2015-2016 Retrospective

27 December 2016

Now that 2016 is coming to an end, I feel like looking back on the stuff I’ve written so far, mostly about Rust, but also touching other topics like Fedora 23 LXDE Spin, Java Code Golf or Plain Text Supremacy.

I wrote a lot more than I had anticipated when I started in April 2015 – 53 entries so far containing more than 50k words totalling over 330k bytes. I have been linked from rust-learning multiple times and I’m honored to have my Rust/Java comparison plagiarized on JaxEnter.com, prompting me to donate my writing on this blog to the public domain.

My personal favorite entry is Holy std::borrow::Cow (+ Redux), both for the usefulness of Cow and the cheesy detective story in the Redux. Those were quite short (at least initially), so perhaps I should write more short articles. I remember being egged on by carols10cents to write it, in spite of my feeling that it was too trivial to warrant a blog post.

I’m most embarrased by my take on Code of Conducts, which spawned a very lively, at times nasty discussion. Still, I stand by my point – that we should reach out to and try for empathy towards those who are opposed to our (or even any!) code of conduct, rather than shaming and shunning them, because alienating people is inherently incompatible with convincing them. The recent US election seems to support my argument rather well.

Rust has matured considerably during the approximately two years I’ve been following it. We got the ? operator, catch_unwind and a slew of stabilized APIs. I did my part with the deprecation and static contsts RFCs, not to mention working on clippy, This Week in Rust, bytecount overflower and a number of other projects including a large number of drive-by PRs after testing clippy on most code bases I could find. I also moderate the /r/rust subreddit and help organize Meetups in the Rhein-Main area.

I’m very happy to be part of the awesome Rust community. Most notably my hat’s off to (in alphabetical order, and I probably forgot to mention some. Sorry) Alex Chrichton, Andrew Gallant, bluss, Florian Gilcher, Hanno Braun, Joshua Landau, Manish Goregaokar, Niko Matsakis. Paho Lurie-Gregg, Pascal Hertleif, Ty Overby, Vincent Esche.

Looking forward, 2017 will prove an interesting year in more than one way. With the political theatre in turmoil, many nations seemingly veering into facism, powerful interests subverting the systems that make the web a force for our personal freedom, we’re in dire need of some safety guarantees that don’t ask us to give up our freedom first. Here’s to hope that Rust can help regain some of that safety.