Existing by coincidence, programming deliberately
Refactoring boilerplate code is always easy in dynamically-typed languages, but sometimes takes a bit more effort when constrained by strong typing. This is something I was puzzling over recently, when the penny dropped for me about how Rust's macros can be used to bridge the gap. Read more
Here's three little Rust tricks that I learned in the last week or so. Each struck me as being an elegant approach to working cleanly within the confines of a strongly-typed language. Read more
Let's say you have a huge amount of JSON data and you want to parse values from it in Node.js. Perhaps it's stored in a file on disk or, more trickily, it's on a remote machine and you don't want to download the entire thing just to get some data from it. And even if it is on the local file system, the thing is so huge that reading it in to memory and calling JSON.parse will crash the process with an out-of-memory exception. Today I implemented a new method for my async JSON-parsing lib, BFJ, which has exactly this type of scenario in mind. Read more
"Bad performance hurts user engagement" is a sentiment that feels intuitively true but can be hard to sell in product conversations. The best way to persuade a non-believer is to point them at hard evidence and for that you need to do a few things with your performance data. Read more
