Blog

All posts

Previous page Next page

Serialising Rust tests - 14 Jan 2019 Rust  serial_test  Tools 

I’m once again prodding the potboiler tests and a couple of the tests I was doing wanted to mess around with the shared database. This had the problem that multiple tests would collide with each other, as the default for Rust testing is to run everything in parallel. This is unusual, but good in many…

Making a Spaceteam timer app with Flutter - 4 Jan 2019 Android  Tool chains 

Some of you may have run into the excellent Spaceteam mobile game. It’s best described as ‘co-operatively shouting at each other to fix your broken ship’, and it’s a lot of fun. Some fun folks then went and made a card game variant of it, which is similar in many ways. Now, both games have…

Experiments in converting code from C to Rust - 27 Nov 2018 C  Rust  Tools 

I’m quite fond of Rust (as a few blog posts on the topic may indicate), but one item I hadn’t really explored was replacing/rewriting existing C code bases in Rust. There’s a general joke about the general notion of “rewriting everything in Rust is of course always the right thing to do!” (Google “rust evangelism…

Clincher: checking your signed git commits - 26 Oct 2018 git 

Recently for a project with tight regulatory requirements we decided that git signing throughout the project was a good idea. There’s a debate about it’s level of effectiveness, given that all it tells you is that a particular commit was made from a particular developers machine, and if they’re not careful, they can end up…

Even more Rockstar: using WebAssembly to run Rust code in browser - 24 Sep 2018 Esolangs  Javascript  Rust  Web 

Two months ago I blogged about how to be a Rockstar developer, and demonstrated it with a Rockstar interpreter called Maiden written in Rust. Now, normally Rust is considered a systems programming language (it even says so on the Rust homepage), and the command-line nature of Maiden aligned well with that. Except that Rust is slowly…

Not all watchers are created equal (or how to make yak shaving useful) - 14 Aug 2018 Clojure  Tools 

I’ve been hacking around with a Clojurescript project recently, and it resulted in a certain amount of yak shaving when I found the watcher system I was using was eating a lot of CPU. On the one hand, yak shaving is bad, because you’re doing other things that aren’t the core task you’d originally meant…

How to be a Rockstar developer! - 30 Jul 2018 Esolangs  Humour  Rust 

You’ve probably followed that clickbait of a title and are hoping for some super-secret tips on how to be a ‘Rockstar developer’, and I’m not going to disappoint on that (technically). But before that, I’m going to note to those of you lucky enough to have not seen that particular variety of recruiter spam that…

PSA: Many ways to manage your Python dependencies - 3 Jul 2018 Howto  Python  Tools 

Having recently learnt about a few more tools, I felt it was worth writing this post. It’s pretty much a PSA, and some of you may well have found most of these, but there are a lot of Python developers out there who haven’t, and the improvements when using some them are considerable, so it’s…

On Mocking Rust - 21 May 2018 Potboiler  Rant  Rust 

I’ve recently picked Potboiler back up again with the intention of doing some expansion work on it, but in order to be able to do this sensibly I first had to actually write some tests for it. First time around I was mostly just trying to hack it together and see where I could get, but…

Bazel: Fast, Correct, Usable – choose two - 14 Mar 2018 Rant  Tools 

I’d recently gotten reminded about Bazel, Google’s ‘boil the ocean‘ build system, and decided to give it a proper go. TL;DR – it’s not ready yet, and might not ever be, unless you’re willing to throw away everything else. I’m generally on the lookout for good build systems. Some of my colleagues are perfectly happy…

Previous page Next page