Blog

I attempted to read more books in 2018 – and it paid off! I read several enjoyable books this year. Here were my favorites.

I’ve been following a number of people that use iPad Pros for “real work”. I’m going on vacation for a couple weeks to Europe and I wanted to leave my laptop at home. That being said, I still wanted a “lifeline” computing device so that I could do some light writing or SSH into a server if necessary.

At ReactConf 2018, the React team introduced a new set of APIs called “Hooks” that allow you to write large swaths of traditional class-based React components as functional components.

Every once-in-a-while a game really sucks me in. Over my vacation in August, I got hooked on ‎Wordscapes — a simple word game where you have to generate valid words from a bag of letters you’re provided to fill in a crossword puzzle. After a few hours playing this, I naturally began to wonder if there is an efficient algorithmic solution to this game.

rustdoc is a great tool, but as of now there isn’t an official way to have its generated docs refresh as you make edits. Running cargo doc with the --open argument will open the generated docs in browser window. If you make changes to your source code, you’ll need to re-run cargo doc to have the changes reflected in your browser. By chaining together a few other Rust tools, we can pretty easily get the functionality of live-reloading docs.

Recently, I was trying out clippy — a linting and static analysis tool for Rust, when I ran into a lint warning that wasn’t immediately clear to me: warning: casting u8 to u16 may become silently lossy if types change.

Over the past few months, I’ve put some thought into tweaking my Twitter usage to better align it with how I’d like to use social media. I’ve never felt particularly “addicted” to or maligned by Twitter. However, left unchecked, it can easily become a time sync that leaves you in a sour mood.

I recently went through the process of switching my blog’s static site generator from Jekyll to Hugo. Both are great tools, but as I’ve updated my website over time, I began to feel constrained by Jekyll — and wanted to switch to something more stable and robust.

This post gives a technical overview and architectural justification for my latest project, corral — a serverless MapReduce framework.