Of late, my main side project has been rug, a stripped-down Git implementation which I’m building in Rust. I’m following along James Coglan’s excellent book Building Git where he lays out how he went about building the same project, in Ruby. <img src=”/images/rug-status.png”…
When you run git diff on a project where you’ve made more than a screenful of changes, the output is automatically redirected to a pager and you can browse through your changes using the familiar less interface. This post shows a minimal example piping output to less. To achieve…
If you’re a programmer, you’re probably fairly comfortable with understanding and interpreting diff patches of the kind that git and other version control systems use. In this post we’ll walk through a Clojure implementation of the Myers’ diff algorithm, which is the algorithm used by Git. I…
* The Little Elixir & OTP Guidebook by Benjamin Tan Wei Hao: an introduction to the Elixir programming language and the OTP framework that comes with it. It focusses on Elixir’s concurrency features and shows you what OTP can do(the book mostly focusses on GenServers and Supervisors) without spending…
* Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool: a book on deliberate practice by one of the researchers who originally coined the term. This book lays out a framework for how to achieve expertise. Briefly, this goes as follows: identify what skills and mental representations an expert possesses, design a step-by-step…
* Messy by Tim Harford: how pursuing tidy systems is harming us and why we should embrace messy systems that better reflect the unpredictableness of the real world. The systems in question can be anything from how you organize your inbox to how cities are laid out. Although it struck me…
Alone on the Wall by Alex Honnold and David Roberts This is a memoir of sorts by a rock climber most famous for his free solo ascents(free soloing = rock climbing without a rope). The reason I picked up this book is because I’ve been doing some climbing myself…
I have lately been studying how databases work under the hood. There are many problems that a database has to solve. At the moment, I’ve been having fun exploring how data is stored on disk. Previously, I wrote about how a hashtable is stored on disk. This post is…