I recently wrapped up a job where I spent the last two years writing the backend of a B2B SaaS product in Rust, so now is the ideal time to reflect on the experience and write about it. Contents Learning The Good Performance Tooling Type Safety Error Handling The Borrow Checker Async Refactoring Hiring Affect The...

tl;dr two portable SSDs, synced with rsync; and a Backblaze bucket synced with restic: I’m finally satisfied with my infrastructure for backups, so I’m writing it up so others can benefit from it. Criteria My requirements for backup infrastructure are: Open source, to minimize the risk of backdoors. Fast, but only...

Yesterday I was reading Exploring the Internet, an oral history of the early Internet. The first part of the book describes the author’s efforts to publish the ITU’s Blue Book: 19 kilopages of standards documents for telephony and networks. What struck me was the description of the ITU’s documentation stack: A week...

This post is, in a sense, a continuation to Unbundling Tools for Thought. It’s an argument for why you shouldn’t try to use a single tool to do everything, aimed at people who have been spent too much time shoveling prose into a “second brain” and have little to show for it. Software tools span a spectrum from...