Author: jra

  • Playing (cards) with Clojure

    I’m learning Clojure, which is a modern Lisp, which is hosted on the JVM. I’m so far really liking the focus on integrating the benefits of functional programming into a modern environment. It is pragmatic and reasonable. It feels like programming for grown-ups, in the same way that Node.js feels like programming for people with…

  • I’m still here…

    While I was working for the DEDIS lab at EPFL, I was not writing here. Now I’m a dad at home, at least until my youngest starts school in a year, and so I’m still not writing here. I work at Pie Aéronefs, where I do various kinds of open source work, most of it…

  • Protecting private keys in Go

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    Today I was looking at Upspin and thinking about private keys. I asked myself, “what would it take to make sure that there was one single copy of the private key in RAM, and that Go and the OS worked together to make sure it never went onto disk?” (Some other people have talked about…

  • My first ever Rust program!

    Here, for posterity, is my first ever Rust program. It checks the key log on the Upspin Key Server. I found myself sprinkling mut’s and unpack()’s here and there like the mutation unpacking fairy, hoping something would work. I don’t think that how you are supposed to do it, but we’ll see. People give Go…

  • Read it and weep

    I searched for “how do I make an HTTP request in Rust?”. I’m a newbie, we do things like that. Don’t judge. I found this. I still don’t know how, because the answer marked correct refers to a library that a comment from 2016 informs me is no longer supported. There’s also a helpful comment…

  • A Go programmer continues to learn Rust

    I went looking for the equivalent of goimports and didn’t find it. Sad. I wanted to use std::fmt to do the same thing as sprintf or fmt.Sprintf. I got stuck on “expected &str, found struct `std::string::String`”. I found a blog posting trying to explain it but I don’t understand enough yet to understand it. What…

  • A Go programmer’s first day with Rust

    Where is the tutorial? The first Google hit gives a redirect to a page explaining that I should read the book. The first page of the book explains that I should read the Second Edition unless I want to go deep, then I should later read the First Edition also (and presumably ignore the things…

  • Python keyword “finally” trumps “return”

    Here is a piece of Python that I did not expect to surprise me: In both Python 2.7 and Python 3, that prints: It seems that in Python, return is just a casual suggestion to the interpreter, and finally gets to decide, “Nope! Your return is canceled and I will do my return instead!” Now,…

  • Job Searching

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    I’m looking for a job that will help me reduce my commute, and get the chance to touch new fascinating things. Here’s a post from last time I was looking for a job, which shows some work samples I am proud of. If any of my readers can hook me up with interesting job postings,…