Fascination Street #12

Writing for the week of 04/21/2025

Another week of mostly writing Rust. I read a number of posts this week about some really interesting projects using Rust, but one article hit my radar that I can really relate to.

https://medium.com/@lordmoma/ok-rust-you-really-have-a-readability-problem-e379df7df8df

I may be hypersensitive to Rust’s syntax after spending so many years with Ruby, but I agree with most of the points. I like the sprinkle of humor as well.

Language design fascinates me. Rust has some specific design decisions. Such as lifetimes. They tell the compiler something it can’t clearly ascertain on its own. That’s powerful. But really ugly and not readable when looking at blocks of code that utilize it.

Some of the community projects that help clean up code blocks and make them more readable might be signs of general consensus around language design. I’m thinking projects like anyhow and even garde. anyhow makes mapping errors a lot easier and it reads so much better. garde makes validations easier using annotations. Those are radically different approaches but in a certain lens they are trying to make code more readable.

After more than a year of writing Rust, I’m still getting use to the syntax. Even during the more frustrating periods, I still really like learning language syntax. That feels Buddhist somehow. I’m sure the suttas cover this idea of being frustrated but still enjoying the process. I’ll have to look into it and try to apply it to other aspects of life.

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Links

• https://skiplabs.io/blog/event-hidden-arch - I’ve worked on a handful of event-driven systems and was hoping to get a little more out of this article. It went in a direction I didn’t expect. Because of that I don’t know if I agree or disagree with the premise of event-driven hiding complexity.
• https://endler.dev/2025/best-programmers/ - this made the rounds and I kinda agree with the points made, but I don’t think it is inclusive of everything that I would credit the best programmers I know of exhibiting.
• https://withinboredom.info/2025/04/12/the-five-critical-roles-of-your-team/ - I liked this. I have written about various team roles in the past. I like to wrap my head around teams and their breakdowns by thinking about roles this way. I enjoyed this post.

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Music

• I’ve been listening to a lot of the DC scene bands, including Fugazi
• I’ve been listening to all of the bands that revolve around Good Riddance, including Only Crime and Creep Division.

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A couple of promotions each week. First, use my invite link to try Warp as your terminal. It’s fast and has some great features. I’m not affiliated with them at all, just really like it. Also, check out my project–Schemabook, especially if you work in an organization that wants to get organized around defining data through contracts and collaboration. Lastly, I’m writing a book about learning Rust if you are familiar with Ruby. Stay tuned. As always, you can connect with me more at https://mikekrisher.com.