Premature Optimization

Premature optimization is one habit that often stifles creativity in programming. It’s a great example of how writing bad code might aftually be better in the long run. This is especially true of those who have taken programming courses because they’ve had the idea of efficiency drilled into their heads. It’s also easy to miss that it’s happening to you, in fact, it might even feel good to be writing such efficient code.

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Hugo, github, lambda, and s3

When I started this blog, I knew I wanted to use a static blog platform instead of something like wordpress. Last time I did a blog I used octopress which I found to be a little awkwardly heavyweight for a static blog. I think that the future of the internet will be moving away from dynamic content generation the way wordpress does it. Why in the world should I have to run a database server just to have a blog?

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Rust First Project

This is my continued foray into learning Rust. I’m just following along with this guide. We’ll se how long it lasts, but so far I like it. It’s actually my preferred style of learning something a bit like the puppet learning vm which I used to first learn Puppet and I now actually get to help develop. This time the tutorial starts with the cargo new command, which I’m guessing is the standard method.

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Rust: Hello World

I’ve been thinking that learning a new language and documenting the process on this blog might be a fun way to live up to the “Write Bad Code” idea. There are two languages I’m currently interested in at the moment: Go and Rust. Although go looks pretty cool, it seems like it’s more geared toward the same niches as ruby. Rust, on the other hand, looks to be intended as more of a systems level language like C/C++.

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Getting Started

The point of this blog is not to encourage bad habits, it’s to engourage getting started even if you know the results will be bad. When I was in High School I was in a jazz choir and we sometimes had to do improvised skat solos. Our teacher, Mr. Cross, gave me a piece of advice that I’ll never forget. He said that you should imagine that you’re holding a big basket full of notes and when you improv, you are grabbing notes from the top.

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