1. I'm a Rust Contributor

    A month or two ago I was on the #rust IRC when someone discovered that pow() didn’t act quite right for unsigned numbers. This was a bug that was isolated to a single function, so it seemed like something that I could handle. The issue got posted, I claimed it and debugged it, and actually managed to fix it! It took a little while, but very early this morning PR #34942 Fix overflow checking in unsigned pow() was merged. Now I’m a contributor to Rust!

    Try to find a small thing that you can fix in something that you use. Somewhere in there is the right issue that you can fix. It’s a great experience. (I really look forward to the release notes for 1.12…)

    Update: It turns out my fix made it into the 1.13 release, and my name is in the contributors section in the release notes.

  2. Trying Docker

    I only vaguely know what Docker is, but I know the pain of manually installing the requirements of a piece of software. A few days ago I read Creating a Basic Webservice in Rust and it inspired me to go back and look at Docker again. I have several ideas for small webservices knocking around in my head right now, so I figured "why not try to deploy them right?"

    The first thing I did was go to the Docker site. The newest version on OS X is a fancy application with some GUI components and a nice menu whale icon. Installing and getting started is a breeze as well, the getting started on Mac docs show every step with pictures, and event walk you through some examples.

    Trying out some of the examples shows a few cool things right away. One, trying the nginx example:

    ~ caleb$ docker run -d -p 80:80 --name webserver nginx
Unable to find image 'nginx:latest' locally
latest: Pulling from library/nginx
51f5c6a04d83: Downloading 30.41 MB/51.36 MB
a3ed95caeb02: Download complete
51d229e136d0: Download complete
bcd41daec8cc: Download complete

    you can see that multiple downloads took place concurrently, the largest one is still running. Once it completes, just going to localhost shows that we now have a webserver running beautifully, with essentially no setup. I also notice that when I was starting the server, I mapped port 80 inside the container to port 80 outside. Again, coming at this with essentially no experience, I hadn't realized quite how much Docker did for you.

    Now that I've made it through the Mac getting started page, I'm going to move on to the Getting Started With Docker page. It's exceptionally well written and self-explanatory, and the Docker docs (at least all the introductory ones I've looked at so far) are just as helpful.

    ~ caleb$ docker run docker/whalesay cowsay $(fortune)
_________________________________________
/ I worked in a health food store once. A \
| guy came in and asked me, "If I melt    |
| dry ice, can I take a bath without      |
\ getting wet?" -- Steven Wright          /
-----------------------------------------
    \
    \
      \
                    ##        .
              ## ## ##       ==
          ## ## ## ##      ===
      /""""""""""""""""___/ ===
  ~~~ {~~ ~~~~ ~~~ ~~~~ ~~ ~ /  ===- ~~~
      \______ o          __/
        \    \        __/
          \____\______/

    I haven't even really used Docker yet, but from a first impression I love the experience. The docs are great, the interface is great, even just the Whale aesthetic is really cute. I'm going to go back to experimenting with this and tell you how to deploy a program next time.

  3. Trying Pelican

    I wrote my own Markdown parser because I wanted the option to add features, and to generate more semantic HTML than I was used to with other static site/blogging platforms. That turned out to be a maintainability problem, and I never got some of the more tricky features like lists (and especially nested lists) working propertly. Instead, I've decided to use a standard platform, Pelican, to write my blog and build my site. I chose Pelican because, while Ruby is nice, I still prefer Python and use it far more frequently. In addition, Pelican uses reStructuredText, which is extensible, so if I want to add more features to my documents, I can. Even by default, reStructuredText has more features than Markdown does [1].

    [1]See? It has footnotes!

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