Still turning a corner at work

[mtbc]

Today marked a new record for me, I pushed maybe a thousand lines of Rust code. That may not seem like much but it is well on the way to doing something useful and has involved my wrestling both Docker and ORM (diesel), along with Rust itself with its tight straitjacket. I still don't have a clear understanding of everything I write, the automated tooling gives me useful hints, so I need to do better at making time to resume working through the Rust Book next week.

I can't say that I am loving Rust, I am somewhat at the whims of complex macro magic from third-party libraries, and when one gets things wrong then the error messages can be truly godawful, so I see my boss' point in suggesting that macros are but a last resort. Nonetheless, I look forward to becoming proficient in Rust, and I feel better for becoming more able to contribute to the creation of our deliverables.

Comments

[wpadmirer]

I admire anyone who writes code. When I have to deal with coding in any way, my whole brain/body wants to just get it over with.

You seem to really enjoy the accomplishment of it. That's wonderful.

[mtbc]

I do enjoy finding creative and elegant solutions and making them work. I get to do that occasionally, at least!

[thewayne]

Rust is a language I'd like to learn some day, probably after I retire. A personal fulfillment goal.

I understand it's gaining ground as a replacement for C/C++ as it has much better memory protection, and Linus is incorporating it into the Linux kernel.

[mtbc]

I'd definitely see it as a safer, powerful C++, and it brings its own interesting challenges that are probably for the best.

[thewayne]

Seems like every new advanced language bring their own interesting challenges that are probably for the best. ;-)  While I do not hang on every utterance of Linus as I am not remotely that level of propeller beanie geek, my personal specialty being relational database design and server manglement, I do think that him deciding that the language is good enough to be incorporated into the Linux kernel is a pretty darn strong recommendation.

[mtbc]

By coincidence, my current work task focuses on generating reports from a RDBMS, I've been using the diesel library which allows programmatic composition of stuff in a richly type-checked way, it's difficult to google about though without running into pages about fuel contamination and suchlike.

[thewayne]

Oh, you're doing exactly what I love!  I so enjoyed reporting from databases!  RDBMS was my career for ever the longest, designing and making databases, front-end work, reporting, etc.  Loved every moment of it.  I could design relationships and tables in my head.  Yeah, I can see where having a library named diesel could be problematic for Googling!

[mtbc]

I generally enjoy working with, well, at least Oracle and PostgreSQL, they're solid and well-documented and don't give me unpleasant trouble. In a couple of different jobs, I ended up being the guy who writes the tricky upgrade scripts, I didn't mind one bit. (-: Separately, I gave a short training talk on the Java Hibernate ORM.

[thewayne]

Cool!  Me, I was a Microsoft SQL Server guy.  I was never a fan of Oracle, loved IBM DB2 as syntactically it was almost identical to MS in their language and very similar in their management console.  PostreSQL is another one of those things that I want to learn and just haven't gotten around to.  As I continue mucking with Python, it may accelerate my move towards digging in to it.