March

Eli Bendersky walks through why the “obvious” approach to parent pointers in a Rust tree fights the borrow checker, then works through the practical alternatives: Rc/Weak pairs, RefCell for interior mutability, and arena allocation with index-based links. A good reference for the moment you hit this wall in your own code.

via Miguel de Icaza ᯅ🍉 (@Migueldeicaza@mastodon.social): Attached: 1 image

A short video gag from Ryan Els capturing the daily relationship between a developer and their IDE — including the autocomplete that insists it knows what you meant to type. The replies are just as relatable: “I just want to use the tab button!”

via Rust Language (@rust@social.rust-lang.org): We got an email from the Serbian Registry of Internet Domain Names (RNIDS), the organisation that is responsible for the .rs top-level domain.

Looks like they are a big fan of Rust. 😊

via Maëlle Salmon (@maelle@mastodon.social): What a cool badge: https://unmaintained.tech/

A badge for projects that are no longer active.

via Martin Fowler (@mfowler@toot.thoughtworks.com): @emilybache@sw-development-is.social has set up a github repository with code samples in several languages for the opening chapter of my Refactoring book. She’s posted a video to her YouTube channel where she introduces this Theatrical Players kata.

Martin Fowler works through the Theatrical Players kata from his Refactoring book, narrating each small, behavior-preserving step as he goes. Watching someone with this much experience talk through the reasoning behind each move — and lean on tests at every step — is far more instructive than reading the finished code.

via Paul Cantrell (@inthehands@hachyderm.io): @voltagex@aus.social Here you go: https://github.com/pcantrell/masto-comment-fetcher

Paul Cantrell shares the Ruby code he uses to pull Mastodon replies in as blog comments on innig.net. It’s not a drop-in library — it leans on context from his own site — but it’s a useful set of recipes if you want to wire fediverse conversations into your own blog.

via Nic Wise (@fastchicken@mastodon.nz): @timbray@cosocial.ca Finally found time to write up how I use Plex + Plexamp. Thanks for asking (the world) and prompting me to actually write the words

A practical guide to self-hosting your music library with Plex and PlexAmp as an alternative to Spotify, Apple Music, and other streaming services. Resonates with anyone who has accumulated a large MP3 collection over the years and wants to maintain control over music they’ve actually paid for.

Roman Kashitsyn lays out a set of goals for designing error types in Rust libraries: prefer specific enums over catch-all types, reserve panics for genuine bugs, lift input validation out of fallible calls, and embed rather than wrap underlying errors. The unifying theme is empathy — design the error type you’d want to handle as a caller.

via Kevin Stewart (@kstewart@hachyderm.io): Observable 2.0 | Observable

Observable 2.0 reframes the notebook company around Observable Framework, an open-source static site generator for building fast, polished data apps from Markdown and JavaScript. Data loaders run at build time, so dashboards ship as plain static files — a refreshingly simple architecture for data visualization on the web.

via Kevin Stewart (@kstewart@hachyderm.io): Why is building a UI in Rust so hard? | Warp

The Warp team explains why Rust’s ownership model — great for systems code — fights against the shared, mutable, deeply-linked object graphs that traditional UI frameworks depend on. Their answer was to go functional: an immediate-mode, state-driven UI architecture that plays to Rust’s strengths instead of against them.