Monthlog 04: February 2020

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This is the 04 installment in my 'Monthlog' - a public list of blog posts, announcements, videos, podcasts, software and libraries that catch my attention each month. I hope that regular readers will skim through the listings and find one, or multiple, things that pique their interest.

Note: Posts are not ordered in any particular way. If you find an article you think I might like, send it to me via one of the messaging channels on my homepage.

Read

Watch

  • MIT, Lecture 3: Editors (vim) (2020) - MIT 'The Missing Semester' introduction to Vim. If you've used Vim for a while, listen to this in the background and you might learn a thing or two. Even if you don't plan to use Vim, the analysis of Vim's modal editing might be of interest.

  • FOSDEM: Cargo Deny - 'A talk about cargo-deny, why we created it, and how it helps us manage our dependencies in the long term.'

Listen

Software and Libraries

  • Pueue - 'A daemon for managing long-running shell commands.' Written in Rust, could be really useful for long-running tasks that must run sequentially, like Machine Learning workloads.

  • Lorri - 'Your project's nix-env.' Finally started using this. Written in Rust, Lorri provides a Daemon to build nix-shell environments in the background. If you use nix, you'll know the pain of long shell builds. Lorri builds things in the background so your nix-env loads more quickly and reloads transparently whenever you change your shell definition. Expect to see a post on how I use lorri day to day soon.

  • ytop - 'A TUI system monitor written in Rust.' Yet another rewrite by CJbassi of his 'top' program. This time it's written in Rust, currently approaching feature parity with the old gotop.

  • Materialize - A newly announced company offering a tool to use SQL queries on live, streaming data. Cool to see Rust being used here, in a very latency-sensitive environment with high data throughput. A year ago I would imagine Go would be used for this kind of task but I think people are slowly coming around to Rust being used in this kind of situation.

Recommended Sources to Follow

Below are a few media sources and voices I follow.

Blogs

Newsletters

Podcasts

  • The Changelog: 'Conversations with the hackers, leaders, and innovators of software development.'
  • Software Engineering Daily: Daily conversations covering anything Software Development related.
  • Linux Unplugged: A Jupiter Broadcasting show. Relaxed, focused on Linux but touches on all things Unix and Open Source.
  • Invest Like the Best: Finance and investing podcast often featuring Crypto.
  • Y Combinator: Conversations with Y Combinator founders.
  • Into the Ether: 'Focusing on all things Ethereum, the leading blockchain for decentralized applications.'