Newsletter #14: Elephants, Rust, Sublime

Hello, everyone! 👋

Let’s talk about the elephants in the room: First, it’s my little lovely mascot that is on top of each newsletter, Fante. I needed something for the 404 page on oida.dev, and my kids love elephants!

Second: Join me and others on Mastodon. You can find me at mastodon.social/@deadparrot. So far it’s a lot of fun! We hang out with so many like-minded folks, and it really feels like Twitter from the early days.

Other than that, some new links for you!

Stefan

Rust for JavaScript Developers #

I did a Rust for JavaScript developers for the folks at shuttle.rs. The entire video is up on YouTube:

You can find a repo if you want to code along on GitHub.

I’m still pumped with energy when I think about this workshop. It has been a lot of fun, the engagement was fantastic and I loved hanging out later on Discord to answer some of the most burning questions around Rust.

Some of my main arguments for Rust were:

1. Yes, it’s fast, and speed might not matter to you. But it’s also resource friendly. You might save a lot of bucks if you write your back-ends in Rust, as did the folks from Tenable (Link to Medium).
2. Rust also makes your programs more correct. Take Rust’s error-handling capabilities for example. Rust forces us to deal with errors, even if that means explicitly ignoring them. In one example in the workshop, we found that the moment we need to enrich our web socket sent requests with additional data, Rusts error-handling helps us make sure that we don’t send any wrong or malicious data over the wire at all. Not by dealing with edge cases, but by leading us to behave on the happy path. This is immensely powerful.

And that’s just the first thing that comes into my mind. The moment you understand that you can be as productive as with any other technology and that you have the ability to go down to a systems level, you see how powerful it is to write in Rust.

Finding a new editor #

GitHub has archived Atom, the code editor that brought us Electron. I haven’t used Atom for too long – VSCode came on the scene shortly after that – but I remember the excitement for this editor, as well as the beautiful introduction video (Link to YouTube). I have been using VSCode ever since and love working with it. But I also think I want to see what other tools offer. So far I’ve tried out Sublime Text again – it was my main editor before VSCode – and saw that a lot of good things have happened. Sublime’s still snappy, and it features LSP integration with gives me all the Rust Analyzer goodness that I need.

Errors are visible but don’t overwhelm me, and with some Vi motions, navigation is really good. I think I give it a spin for a while. Debugging with LLDB is not where I want it, but to be honest, I rarely use LLDB, to begin with.

I’m really curious about trying out new editors. Tell me your favorite editor setup, I really want to see what’s out there.

See you next time #

It’s the last week before Christmas, and whether you celebrate Christmas or not, I wish you some relaxing days until the end of the year. I have some announcements to make in early 2023, so I guess I see you then?

Cheers – Stefan