Steve Klabniks blog
Your “Bluesky account” is not just a Bluesky account: it is an account that can be used with a variety of other applications. This post is going to be an exploration of part of what that means from a technical perspective, so if you’re not a software developer, this post isn’t…
I haven’t had time to blog in a while, I have a lot to say, but have been doing a lot of things and so haven’t gotten words down in a while. One of those things in the past few weeks has been picking back up my Rue project. I’m really excited for what it’s turning into, even…
Okay, so you’ve got the basics of working with Claude going. But you’ve probably run into some problems: Claude doesn’t do what you want it to do, it gets confused about what’s happening and goes off the rails, all sorts of things can go wrong. Let’s talk about how to improve…
In my last post, I suggested that you should start using Claude in your software development process via read-only means at first. The idea is just to get used to interacting with the AI, seeing what it can do, and seeing what it struggles with. Once you’ve got a handle on that…
I want to continue with my series on how you can use Claude Code for software development , but I have at least two posts I need to write first. This post is one of those two. Thanks for all of the kind words you all have said about the first post in the series, I’ll absolutely…
2025 was an interesting year in many ways. One way in which it was interesting for me is that I went from an AI hater to a pretty big user. And so I’ve had a few requests for a “using Claude” guide, so I figure new year, why not give it a shot? The lack of this kind of content…
I started using Rust on December 21, 2012. It’s now December 22, 2025. That’s a long time. I don’t have a ton of thoughts about Rust to share today, like I thought I might. I program in the language regularly, it’s nice, I prefer it to all others. I have my beefs and my regrets,…
In December of 2012, I was home for Christmas, reading Hacker News. And that’s when I saw “ Rust 0.5 released ."" I’m a big fan of programming languages, so I decided to check it out. At the time, I was working on Ruby and Rails, but in college, I had wanted to focus on…
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of…
Someone on Reddit recently asked: What would make a Rust implementation of something faster than a C implementation, all things being the same? I think this is a great and interesting question! It’s really tough because it ultimately relies on what exactly you mean by “all things…
Recently, something happened that made me kind of like, break a little bit. I’m still not entirely sure why this whole thing bothers me so much, but here’s a blog post about it. I happened to ask ChatGPT something for fun. I often do this just to see what it says, and if I feel…
It’s kind of hard to believe it’s been ten years since Rust 1.0 was released. I stopped working on Rust three years ago, and frankly, the last three years have been pretty rough. But 2025 is shaping up to be a really good year for me, with lots of positive changes. With that in…
Today, Bluesky rolled out blue checks . And, I was given one. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of this sort of feature, however, I also don’t really think this kind of feature is for me. I really like the idea of domain verification; I have been like “oh okay that’s coming from a…
A while back, someone on the internet asked about this syntax in Rust: * pointer_of_some_kind = blah; They wanted to know how the compiler understands this code, especially if the pointer wasn’t a reference, but a smart pointer. I wrote them a lengthy reply, but wanted to expand…
When people first hear about unsafe in Rust, they often have questions. A very normal thing to ask is, “wait a minute, doesn’t this defeat the purpose?” And while it’s a perfectly reasonable question, the answer is both straightforward and has a lot of nuance. So let’s talk about…
I tried to write this post yesterday, but I didn’t like my approach there. Last night, I had a conversation with one of my best friends about it, and he encouraged me to write this, but in a different way. I think this way is better, so thanks, dude. The other day, Microsoft…
A while back, I wrote A sad day for Rust about the Actix-web unsafe controversy. The short of it was, Actix-web was using some unsound unsafe code. When this was discovered, people responded pretty harshly, and the maintainer quit. Others picked up the work, but it still wasn’t…
Rust has two main string types: String and &str . Sometimes, people argue that these two types make Rust code difficult to write, because you have to think about which one you should be using in a given situation. My experience of writing Rust is that I don’t really think about…
There’s an old saying: There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. ― Phil Karlton I also appreciate the joke version that adds “and off by one errors.” Lately, I’ve been thinking about this saying, combined with another old joke: “The…
One of the reasons I am enthusiastic about BlueSky is because of the way that it works. So in this post, I am going to lay out some of the design and the principles behind this design, as I understand them. I am not on the BlueSky team, so these are my takes only. Let’s begin.…
A very, very long time ago, I was introduced to Gerrit . To be honest, I hated it. However, lately I have become interested in divesting from git and GitHub, and so have decided to re-visit various “forges” to see what’s out there. The “why” for this will come later, and I’m not…
TL;DR: I think that a focus on memory safe languages (MSLs) versus non memory-safe languages is a bit of a red herring. The actual distinction is slightly bigger than that: languages which have defined behavior by default, with a superset where undefined behavior is possible, vs…
Hey there! A shorter post today, but I wanted to continue my series on Buck by going over some things that have changed since this series started. Updating Buck Lots of great stuff has been happening since the initial release of buck2, and we’d like to take advantage of that. If…
In a previous post , I laid out the basics of building a Rust project with buck2 . We compared and contrasted it with Cargo. But what about one of the biggest and best features that Cargo has to offer, the ability to use other Rust packages from crates.io? They don’t use buck, so…
A few days ago, Facebook/Meta/idk announced that buck2 is now open source . Buck2 is an extensible and performant build system written in Rust and designed to make your build experience faster and more efficient. As it just so happens, I have taken an increasing interest in build…
I find myself thinking about a particular design principle of Rust today. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it named specifically before, but it gets referred to from time to time, and I think it’s an under-rated but very important aspect of why Rust works so well. I was going to refer…
I first heard this adage in the Rails space. I don’t know who to attribute this to, but I also never wrote it down. So, time to write it down, and if you know of the origin of this aphorism, let me know and I’d love to put it here! I think that the first formulation of this…
There’s a famous quote by Eleanor Roosevelt: great minds discuss semantics, average minds discuss syntax and small minds discuss syntax of comments (Apologies, Phil Wadler.) I’d like to preface this post that I do not consider this to be an actual proposal to change Rust, even a…
December 21 is the anniversary of when I first heard about Rust way back in 2012. I used to write yearly posts about it; the last time I did was in 2018 . That makes today ten years. I thought I’d have something big to say here, but… I just don’t. Part of that is because I…
There is a pretty straightforward design pattern called “out parameters” that you may have heard of before. In short, the question is, does your function wear pants… err, I mean, does your function modify data like this: fn foo () -> i32 { // body elided } let x = foo (); or like…
Let’s talk about safe and unsafe in Rust. To review, Rust has a concept of “unsafe code.” Unsafe Rust is a superset of safe Rust, letting you do some extra things that are dangerous. It’s your job as a programmer to verify that your code is playing by the rules, because the…
Today is my first day at Oxide Computer Company , where I will be doing engineering work. When Oxide introduced themselves to the world, I saw a lot of folks who were pretty confused. At its core, what Oxide is doing is very straightforward: you give Oxide money, and Oxide gives…
I’ve had a few different blogs over the years. Every so often, I change things. One of the nice things about having your own site is that you can do whatever you want! So, I’m folding my old blogs’ content into my main website. I’m sick of adding new subdomains, and it all feels…
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how often Rust changes. There are some people that assert that Rust stays fairly static these days, and there are some people who say Rust is still changing far too much. In this blog post, I want to make a data driven analysis of this…
A long time ago, I wrote “Should you learn C to “learn how the computer works”?” . This was part 1 in a three part series. A year later, I got around to part 2, ““C is not how the computer works” can lead to inefficient code” . It’s been five more months. I don’t think I really…
actix-web is dead. This situation is bad, from all sides. When Rust was a tiny, tiny community, I thought to myself, “wow, I wonder how long this will last? Probably 1.0 will kill it.” Sort of playing off of Eternal September , I assumed that over time, the community would grow,…
A little over a year ago, I wrote “Should you learn C to ‘learn how the computer works’” . It was a bit controversial. I had promised two follow-up posts. It’s taken me a year, but here’s the first one. In that post, I argued that C doesn’t “work like the computer”, but rather,…
One fun thing about having a personal domain is that you can keep the contents the same forever, but take a few days every so often to port it to some new stack you want to try out. A while back, I had my site on GitHub Pages using Jekyll . This has long been the sort of default,…
There’s a war going on. When isn’t there a war going on? But I’m not talking about a physical war here: I’m talking about a war over meaning. This particular war is a fight over what “open source” means. Let’s take a few steps back. The Free Software Foundation People organize…
Yesterday, I signed an offer letter from Cloudflare. I’ll be the product manager of Storage, which is the part of the company that’s working on data storage products for the Cloudflare Workers platform. I’ll be starting at the end of the month. I think a lot of you will say “that…
In a previous post , I discussed the history of open source, and ended with this claim: Today’s developers have never learned about this history, or don’t care about it, or actively think it’s irrelevant. … For the same reasons that “open source” came up with a new name, I think…
Today is a very interesting day. It’s giving me a lot of feels. Today is Rust Latam , a Rust conference in Montevideo. And I’m not there. This is significant because, as far as we know, I’m the only person who has been to every Rust conference in existence so far. I went to…
I decided to try and learn Ada. I love programming languages. This post documents my attempt, and explains what I learned. This is pretty stream of consciousness and basically is a bunch of random notes, so if you hate that, better close the tab. I typed my thoughts up pretty…
On December 18, 2009 1 , the Semantic Versioning specification was announced. More commonly known as SemVer, it provided guidance for developers regarding software versions: I propose a simple set of rules and requirements that dictate how version numbers are assigned and…
I started working at 15, when I took a job as a pizza cook. Over the next seven years, I moved up the ranks, to a driver, shift manager, and then as part of the “new store opening team.” The franchise was growing, and we needed to help new franchisees open their new stores. I’d…
Each year, we ask the community to write blog posts about what they want to see on Rust’s roadmap for the next year . This is my post for Rust in 2019. Rust 2021: Maturity This year is also a bit special; in 2018, we introduced “editions” to Rust, on a roughly three-year…
Today is six years since I first heard of Rust. I wrote a post last year about it. This past year was… intense. Rust 1.31 was basically Rust 2.0, at least in the marketing sense. I burned myself out getting the first edition of the book together for Rust 1.0, and I burned myself…
There’s been some Programming Language Discourse lately, and I have some thoughts. It’s mostly centered around a comment on the orange website : I would put it simply: Clojure was designed by a thinker, who creates when he is away from the keyboard, not in front of it. When one…
There’s a fairly common argument that pops up on programming forums, and it’s about the nature of what “garbage collection” means. In the research world, this is what GC means: Garbage collection (GC), also known as automatic memory management, is the automatic recycling of…
I’ve often seen people suggest that you should learn C in order to learn how computers work. Is this a good idea? Is this accurate? I’m going to start with my conclusion right upfront, just to be crystal clear about what I’m saying here: C is not “how the computer works.” I don’t…