Newsletter #11: Year in Review

Hi folks 👋

The end is near! Well, the end of 2021 at least! And what a year it has been. After watching a “year in review” show with my family I realized that so much has happened, that my mind distributed everything over the course of several years. I live in Austria, and we’re confronted by a constant mix of Corona uncertainties and inner-political fiascos. At least the latter ones have become quite entertaining over the course of the year if that grim sense of humor is up to your alley. But still, it takes time to process all this. And this can drain energy. Not talking about all that stuff that has happened worldwide.

But there have been lots of positive experiences in 2021 as well. I spent a lot of time with my lovely family. I’m playing Lego each day (seriously, how cool is that?!).

I created five new workshops and was able to give them in front of a great audience. Actually, I like doing workshops a lot more than giving talks. I don’t consider myself a particularly great speaker, but I think I’m quite good at teaching.

Oh, I introduced Rust at work! That’s some achievement right there.

I also managed to attend one in-person conference in Düsseldorf in early November. It was quite a surreal feeling, to be honest, but it worked out great. And it was nice to see so many old friends again. The conference itself had a strong design and UX focus but was suited for people from all areas of the creative industry.

One of the most fascinating experiences at the conference was that some people heard me chatting with others and told me that they recognize my voice. With this crowd, they usually refer to the German web development podcast I’m co-hosting. But no, they’ve been talking about my involvement with Rust Linz which they’ve been following for a whole year and are huge fans of. This is fantastic! This simple feedback gives me so much and really brought to attention how much we’ve reached with our little idea.

So if I don’t let myself be too occupied with the world going bonkers, I can say it was quite a successful year personally. Lots of stuff to enjoy!

New year resolutions? I have none. The only thing I really want to achieve is to finally learn the hand whistle. This has been bugging me for 30 years.

Oh, if you’ve missed it, there’s a huge update on my website. Tons of content related to both Rust and TypeScript, ready for you to consume. Find all the links down below.

And with that: Take care, stay healthy. Live long and prosper. See you next year!

Happy new year and good luck in 2022,

Stefan

Content updates #

Introducing slides. There haven’t been a lot of articles lately as I was too busy writing and preparing workshops. That’s also content work, but it doesn’t appear on my regular feed. And that bugged me. So, after seeing that I don’t have content updates on my website and that I don’t have a proper place to do coverage for my workshops and talks, I opened up my own slides section on my website! This blog post gives you the details on how I did it. And these are the results:

Slides: The TypeScript Masterclass. I’m doing public and private workshops on TypeScript’s type system. Here are all the slides and additional coverage as examples. It’s huge! If you want me to present this at your company, hit me up!

Slides: Serverless Rust. How can you use Rust for Serverless development? Is it even worth it? Check out all the details on AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and how to write serverless applications in Rust for both infrastructure providers.

Slides: Idiomatic Rust. Write better Rust code. Techniques, tools, and design patterns to make sure your code is more readable, easier to maintain, and plays well with others. This is a workshop I loved giving! You can expect an article series based on that topic.

Slides: Network Applications using Tokio and Rust. All 120 slides for my 2-day Rust and Tokio workshop, including examples, additional videos, and more!

Btw. all topics are available as workshops your company can book. I’m doing paid in-house workshops occasionally, so if you’re interested, I’m happy to hear from you!

Getting started with Rust. So many people are Rust-curious and want to get started. The learning curve is steep, and some people might get demotivated by it. So I tried to compile the resources that helped me most, based on how you want to learn.

The humble function overload. Conditional types in TypeScript are great, but sometimes simple function overloads are just exactly what you need. Keep your code simple by using the right tool at the right time.

German: Ferris Talk #2 on Rust’s Traits. A German article on how cool and powerful traits are!

German: Ferris Talk #4 on Async Rust. How is Rust handling async and why is it different from others?

As I told you: A huge content update! Hope you enjoy it!

Cinema #

TypeScript. Gradual, structural, dynamic, static. My talk at NG-BE. Sadly, I wasn’t able to be there in person, but it was still fun to attend! And the organizers are so kind! This talk is all about how to go from minimal typing to advanced things like conditional types and string template literal types. Check it out!

Tokio, Warp, and WebSockets. My talk on how to create a WebSockets server with Tokio and Warp! It already has over 9000 views, which is unreal to me. Thank you for your support!

Serverless Rust. A da-capo of my Serverless Rust talk with We are Developers from September.

Flatulence, Crystals, and Happy Little Accidents by Nick Fitzgerald. Not a talk by myself, but from Nick who is doing fantastic work in WebAssembly and Rust. This is a hobby project he did which is super fun to watch. One of those conference talks you can have at every conference, not only Rust-related.

Yes, Node is part of the web platform by James Snell. James is arguably one of my most favorite speakers and one of the brightest minds in the Node.js community. His talk on Node.js and the web platform shows

Appearances #

Due to popular demand, there will be another edition of my TypeScript workshop with Smashing Magazine in April. Check out all the details, can’t wait to see you there!

I know that a lot of people would love to do a Rust workshop with me, and I’m doing something for next year. If it’s a Rust workshop I do on my own, or if it’s a video course is yet to be decided. I’m actively developing the content.

Links #

How not to learn Rust by Denys is a fantastic piece on every obstacle you might encounter when learning Rust. Highly recommended.

Protocol imports in Node. Axel Rauschmayer writes about protocol imports in Node. Another step in the Node ecosystem towards standards! I believe we’re going to see protocol imports a lot more in the future.

SE Radio: Bob Nystrom on Dart. Robert Nystrom works at Google on Dart and is telling a lot about the role of Dart in today’s programming language ecosystem, its runtime, and what to expect from it. It’s funny that I’ve never looked into Dart after it came out, and lots of folks considered it dead. Well, the rumors of Dart’s death are highly exaggerated. It seems to have had its strongest year!

That’s it for 2021! #

Friends, thank you so much for sticking around and reading all my content. I highly appreciate it! I hope to see you in 2022 with lots of new energy, a fading pandemic, and a ton of new content!

Take care!

– Stefan