Rust, Hemingway and Shared Ideas

Posted by Ian Whitney on October 15, 2015

Welcome back!

For the past few months I’ve been writing a presentation for Rocky Mountain Ruby, which left me with little time to write anything else. But that presentation is now done, allowing me to return to less stressful pursuits.

Eventually my talk will be on Confreaks, but as of this writing it’s not up. If you want to read the script I followed, it’s in this repo.

If you do watch/read my talk, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if you said, “This sounds familiar!” While I was talking there was a lot of Twitter chatter that boiled down “Ian Whitney’s talk is a lot like [talk x]”. For example

And there’s probably about a million other posts/journals/presentations that have a massive Venn diagram overlap with my presentation. This proves two things:

  1. I’m terrible at Google, as I hadn’t heard of any of these other talks.
  2. The message is important and hard to hear, otherwise there wouldn’t be all these people saying the same thing.

Though I found the process of writing a talk to be incredibly stressful, actually attending the conference was an excellent experience. If you have not attended a small, single-track conference before I recommend it. The presentations were good, and the conversations I forced myself to have were better.

Though I tried to have non-programming discussions, the topic proved impossible to avoid. And some of those conversations led to my most-recent blog post, Rust by Trial and Error, in which I try to learn Rust by refactoring an http://exercism.io problem.

If, like me, your first (or main) language is Ruby then I think Rust is a nice language to learn. It’s different enough from Ruby that I’m forced to learn about new things (memory management, immutability, pattern matching). But it’s not so different from Ruby that it gives me a headache (see: Haskell). Your mileage may vary, as always.

And that’s it for now. More to come. Until next time, true receivers.