Saint Pierre and Miquelon
Just off the southern coast of Labrador, there’s a cluster of small islands named Saint Pierre and Miquelon.
Stegosaurus Dormant
Greg Owen's blog on programming, software engineering, and sundry miscellany
Latest posts
There is no ‘we’ in design docs
Once your software project reaches a certain size, you probably want to have a design document that describes how the system you’re building should behave. Putting your design into natural language and diagrams before you put it into code helps you get to the correct design more quickly, since words and pictures are easier to read and change than code. A design doc also encourages everyone on the…
dui: like du, but interactive
Sometimes I just want to know why my computer’s disk is full. du will give me a firehose of information, but it’s slow and the results are hard to parse. I don’t need to know the size of every file, just which directories happen to be taking up a lot of bytes. I could download a file size visualizer from the internet, but that feels like overkill.
Understanding #[derive(Clone)] in Rust
This post assumes that you have an entry-level familiarity with Rust: you’ve fought with the borrow checker enough to start to internalize some of its model; you’ve defined structs, implemented traits on those structs, and derived implementations of common traits using macros; you’ve seen trait bounds and maybe used one or two. Most importantly, you know what the Clone trait is and why you would…
How to install the latest nightly Rust that supports rustfmt (or any other component)
tl;dr: rustup toolchain install nightly --allow-downgrade -c rustfmt
Interviewing at Sigma
We’re hiring at Sigma Computing, and we want to make sure that everyone who interviews with us knows what to expect. I wrote up a blog post for the Sigma Computing blog that describes the different kinds of interviews we give and what we’re looking for in each one:
Lessons from several years of building a low-code BI tool
BI tools allow people to interact with data without writing code. At some level, this is also the core problem of other low-code or no-code tools like app builders or websites that help you make websites. Those tools tend to perform simpler operations on the data (searching and filtering instead of statistical formulas), but there’s a lot of overlap in the challenges you face when your users want…
Code Names
Naming, as they say, is hard.
What is a Kubernetes ingress, actually?
I recently had to configure a new Kubernetes ingress at work. Before I deployed the ingress into our network, I wanted to understand what it was and what it would do.
Blazing-fast jump-to-grep in Emacs using ripgrep
I’ve recently started using ripgrep, a modern grep replacement written in Rust, and it’s fantastic. It’s just so fast. It may not sound like much, but there’s a huge difference between waiting a few seconds for search results and having them instantly: it means that searching doesn’t break my flow.