Rust is quite an exciting programming language from two points of views for me. On one hand there’s strong influence from functional programming lanugages, such as OCaml, in Rust to feel like an expression oriented language with pattern matching1, algebraic data types2 etc. Then there’s also the focus on zero cost abstractions3 in Rust which makes it possible to be competitive with C/C++ when it comes to performance4. Even though C++ is no longer a stagnant language, Rust is increasing a very good option already where former is dominating currently, at the very least for greenfield projects....

Changing existing code in a software program is one of the most common things software programmers do in their day to day jobs. For a well maintained piece of code such as the Linux kernel the frequency of changes could be quite high, and pervasive changes touching a more than double digit source files are not that rare. Patch1 is a set of changes to a program. Patches, as shown in the following example, contains + indicating lines which are to be added and - indicating lines which are to be removed....

I thought of putting a bit of pressure on myself by making a list of goals public. Some of the goals, such as the reading target, I’ve already managed to reach last year, but some, like writing, I’ve found quite difficult to stick with in the past. Those are the kind of goals which I want to do better this year! Reading Books I’m tracking reading progress in Goodreads Reading Challenge....

Notable Books I had a pretty productive year when it comes to reading. Following are some of the notable books from the ones I read this year. Poetry Mary Oliver’s poetry was one of the best discoveries for me this year. I ended up reading about five poetry collections from her and I liked all of them. Among the collections, Felicity, House of Light and Red Bird contaied some of the favourite poems by her....

For Want of a Nail I thought it would be fun to translate a poem, For Want of a Nail which has an interesting history1 which I came across while reading about The Five Whys2 technique. The version of the poem reproduced in this post is attributed to Welsh poet George Herbert3. This is a poem which illustrates The Five Whys analysis to find the cause-and-effect relationship underlying a problem in an easy to remember form....