Hello and welcome 👋🏻 I started this blog to help me build a habit of learning in public and to document my batch at the Recurse Center. To read posts a...
I was coding with Claude the other day, and like many engineers, I experienced the magical surge of productivity, and awe, watching it produce options for solutions, with reasoned pros and cons and then implement whichever one I thought best (I’m not full vibe coding…yet). I thought that it was like having an enchanted loom, that could produce the patterns that I wanted, but sometimes struggled to…
Contents Introduction Creating indirection with the ampersand Validity Mutability Declaring indirection Summary Introduction Was Rust the first language you learnt where you had to deal with pointers (and references)? Are you about to start writing some Go? Will you be dealing with pointers in Go? If yes to all these, this article might be for you! I’m currently on a Go project and was finding a…
Intro This post looks at a fun maths-y problem I had transferring my maze display function from ASCII-art in the terminal to pixels and points in Nannou's window . My starting point, displaying a maze using ASCII characters and the terminal: Where I wanted to get to, displaying a maze using pixels and Nannou: (To more clearly illustrate the problem, I'm using a small, hardcoded, sidewinder maze…
Introduction This post details one of the rare occasions where changing your code with the sole priority of “just making it work” creates an end result that's arguably superior to the “proper” code you had initially set out to write. Contents Context What I wanted to do Why I wanted to do it How I started to implement this approach Where I got totally blocked What I did instead TL;DR (If you want…
Introduction This post looks at the things that helped or hindered me in achieving the goals from my Recurse Center (RC) application. Hopefully it’s useful for future recursers or anyone thinking about applying. Contents Application goals How did I do? How did I get there? What helped? What hindered? Application goals I put four main goals into my RC application: Deepen my knowledge of Rust Come…
Disclaimer: Mostly insight free zone below I started this thinking I would be able to draw out some useful insights and reflections on my time at RC...but apparently all I’m up to is listing what I’ve done during my final day... Final day at RC Meditation, nice camaraderie and solidarity from the others about never graduating today Check-ins Writing a presentation on translating index co-ordinates…
Intro Last time I posted, I had just finished the first iteration of the maze Cell type. The code has taken a big leap forward since then. We now have: Two more iterations of Cell A grid to to hold the cells Maze making algorithms to create passages between cells (sidewinder and binary tree) Display function to represent the maze on the terminal This is in a large part due to various wonderful…
The purpose of this post is to make myself feel better about not being able to solve a problem by stating it clearly so it's easier for the good samaritan(s) who respond to my request for help. Contents: What do I want to happen, and why? How have I tried to make this happen? What did I expect to see? What am I seeing instead? How have I tried to resolve the issue so far? What do I want to happen,…
If you’re new to Rust and playing around with println() as a way of trying to understand ownership, this post could be useful for you. The key takeaway is short, sweet and in TL;DR . The journey I took to get there makes up the rest of this post: Trying to break my code with an ownership error (and failing) Investigating Understanding Trying to break my code with an ownership error (and…
Welcome to the second instalment of my journey into maze making in Rust. At the end of the first instalment , I triumphed over declaring recursive data types, learnt a lot about indirection and clarified my mental model for compile time vs run time errors. However, I was also unable to print one of the cells that I’d declared, with Rust complaining about ownership. So, that’s today’s job:…