In this post we'll explore what happened when I migrated away from Google Analytics (GA) to a self-hosted solution. The tool that I migrated to is an open-source platform called Countly . It offers a subset of features from what GA offers.
One of the frequent challenges in C is that pointers are nothing but a memory address. A callee who is passed a pointer doesn’t truly know anything other than the type of object being pointed at, which says some things about alignment and how that pointer can be used… maybe. If it’s a pointer to void ( void * ) then…
I last wrote in October about my work on speeding up the Rust compiler. With the year’s end approaching, it’s time for an update.
The issue to stabilize an initial version of async/await in Rust has left final comment period. The feature looks slated to stabilize in an upcoming release, most likely 1.39. This represents the culmination of an enormous amount of work by people all over the Rust community. But it’s also only the beginning of…
The authors are pleased to announce the release of a fully-featured...
One of the best ways to learn and come up with new ideas is to focus intensely on a problem, then let your mind wander. I’ve enjoyed doing this when problem solving and learning, and recently I’ve been thinking about how weird it is to build trust in your unconscious to do the work for you, especially when it comes to…
sourcehut is a network of useful open source tools for software project maintainers and collaborators, including git repos, bug tracking, continuous integration, and mailing lists.
Most CPU architectures in use today have an instruction called popcount , short for “population count”. Here’s what it does: it counts the number of set bits in a machine word. For example (assuming 8-bit words for simplicity), popcount(00100110) is 3 and popcount(01100000) is 2 .
February 19, 2019
The idea of a zero cost abstraction is very important to certain programming languages, like Rust and C++, which intend to enable users to write programs with excellent performance profiles with relatively little effort. Since this idea is fundamental to the design of Rust and my work, I want to investigate, for a…
Open-source animation tool will be officially adopted by Ubisoft Animation Studio in Paris to create series inspired by Ubisoft worlds.
In 2007 I wrote a pair of modding tools, binitools , for a space trading and combat simulation game named Freelancer . The game stores its non-art assets in the format of “binary INI” files, or “BINI” files. The motivation for the binary format over traditional INI files was probably performance: it’s faster to load…
I recently switched laptops, which I was resisting vehemently. But it got to the point where I was considering duct tape, and I was advised to make the move now. What I wanted to do was hold off buying another Apple MacBook until my Puri.sm Librem phone shipped, and if…
A Rust library for easy and understandable async programming
Two Truths and a Take, Season 1 Episode 29
Two fun things happened recently and the proximity of the two made something go click in my head and now I think I understand how bytecode interpreters work.
Note: This post is from 2019— you can find my 2020 update here . I'm making over $400 / month with my music — mostly through Spotify. Of course that’s not enough to support a full-time artist but that’s not what I’m trying to be. I don't tour, I don't sell merch and I'm not on a label. I j
A delightful language with friendly error messages, great performance, small assets, and no runtime exceptions.
Starting at 1342 UTC today we experienced a global outage across our network that resulted in visitors to Cloudflare-proxied domains being shown 502 errors (“Bad Gateway”). The cause of this outage was deployment of a single misconfigured rule within the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF)
This research presents VPN⁰, the first distributed virtual private network offering a privacy preserving traffic authorization and validation mechanism.
Discussions: Hacker News (347 points, 37 comments), Reddit r/MachineLearning (151 points, 19 comments) Translations: Chinese (Simplified), French, Korean, Portuguese, Russian “There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace - those qualities you find always in that…
Evernote has been plagued by a series of managerial missteps and failed product launches. The company’s future is far from certain.
At Monday’s WWDC conference, Apple announced a cool new feature called “Find My”. Unlike Apple’s “Find my iPhone”, which uses cellular communication and the lost…
There’s a lot of fantastic research into 2D graphics rendering these days. Petr Kobalicek and Fabian Yzerman have been working on Blend2D , one of the fastest and most accurate CPU rasterizers on the market, with a novel JIT approach. Patrick Walton of Mozilla has explored not just one, but three separate approaches…
Although they didn’t know one another at the time, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer both found themselves at a similar place in life in the summer of 1989: just out of university and uncertain what to do next. Both saw the same unusual advertisement in the newspaper: an advertisement for programmers who could also write…
