38 / Function Colors Are Rusty

Hey everyone, hope you had a good week! We’ve had some snow in the last days, which was a ton of fun ☃️

Tweet of the Week

Eleanor Rigby Loved NFTs and was shocked when one day she logged on "All my apes gone" — @DialHForHagai

Favourites

• Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen (theguardian.com)

  An edited extract from the Book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention by Johann Hari about the effects social media and being always-on can have on your attention.

• In Defense of Async: Function Colors Are Rusty (thecodedmessage.com)

  Jimmy Hartzell makes a good point on the old debate of colored functions, why they are good and why there should be more colors.

• Computers as I used to love them (tonsky.me)

  Nikita compares Syncthing to Dropbox and talks about the beauty in simple software (without bloat or upselling).

Culture

• I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months. (benadam.me)

  Ben Adam explains four implications of Amazons operating model (a federation of smaller companies) and why it didn’t work for him. Thanks, Lukas!

• How Signal is playing with fire (platformer.news)

  Casey Newton about how Signal implementing untraceable payments puts end-to-end encryption at risk, as it conflicts with anti-money laundering and KYC (Know Your Client) laws.

• Wrap Up and Q&A (jacobian.org)

  Jacob Kaplan-Moss wraps up their series on work sample tests and answer a few questions that came up. If you’re in hiring or interested in the topic, make sure to check out the whole series, can’t recommend it enough.

Software Engineering

• Minecraft as a k8s admin tool (eric-jadi.medium.com)

  Eric Jadi created a Kubernetes admin tool as a Minecraft mod. Thanks, Eric!

• Upgrading Executable on the Fly (nginx.org)

  A blogpost about Unix signals and how nginx upgrades itself on the fly.

• The 7 Code Review Manners (reutsharabani.medium.com)

  Reut Sharabani collected some great points on writing good code reviews.

Rust

• Improved portability and performance 🦀 (pngquant.org)

  Kornel about his experience in rewriting libimagequantfrom C to Rust.

• Porting Rust's std to rustix (blog.sunfishcode.online)

  sunfishcode ported Rust’s std (partially) to Rustix, a system-call wrapper library, improving readability and taking the first step towards Rust on Linux without libc.

• Ranges and suffering (kaylynn.gay)

  Kaylynn dives deep into the inner workings of Rust ranges (for example (0..9)) and how they could be improved.

• 12 Rust Tips and Tricks you might not know yet (federicoterzi.com)

  Federico Terzi wrote a clickbaity title but has collected some useful things for your Rust code (like defer!).

• An Introduction To Session-based Authentication In Rust (lpalmieri.com)

  Luca Palmieri in Chapter 10 of their Book from Zero To Production In Rust talks about setting up a web server and session-based authentication in Rust.

• Dyn async traits, part 7: a design emerges? (smallcultfollowing.com)

  Niko Matsakis shares the goals and design ideas of building dyn async traits into Rust (making the amazing #[async_trait] redundant).

Children of the Coin

• Web3 is Bullshit (stephendiehl.com)

  Moxie Marlinspike wrote two dApps and shares their first impression of the so-called web3, noting that most of it is not as decentralised as some want to portrait it.

• In Response to My first impressions of web3 (web.archive.org)

  Bee wrote a response to the post above and defends the so-called web3, saying that the centralised services will go away.

Cutting Room Floor

• How Hobbies Infiltrated American Life (theatlantic.com)

  Julie Beck about the history of hobbies and how it can build a personal brand, teach you a skill but can also miss their goal to de-stress and relax.

• How to design a house to last for 1000 years (part III) (constructionphysics.substack.com)

  Brian Potter explains the choices he’d make to design a house to last for 1000 years (spoiler: unreinforced concrete and lots of steel).

• Scan of the Month: Game Boy Compendium (scanofthemonth.com)

  If you’ve ever wondered what a Game Boy looked on the inside, this page has CT scans of the original GameBoy, GameBoy Color, GameBoy Advance, Nintendo DSi and the Nintendo Switch, with useful information about various components.