Rust

Live and Let Learn with Rust, Quantum Computing and Piloting aeroplanes

In mid 2022 I was presented with an amazing opportunity through no effort of my own: VMware, the company I worked for, announced it was being acquired by a non-remote, non-open-source-oriented multi-national in a somewhat lengthy 18 month process. As a fully-remote staff engineer on an open-source project I estimated a 75 to 90 percent probability that I’d receive a redundancy in around 18 months time.

A redundancy, really? An amazing opportunity? This post is a personal reflection and reminder to my future self to step back and evaluate the potential opportunities that a situation provides. I’m currently using this opportunity to weave three passions of mine into a possible future of software engineering with Rust on quantum computing projects and piloting aeroplanes on the side. Sure, reality may force me to compromise in one way or another in time, but for now I’m leaving my options open.

Feb 22, 2024 7 min read Programming, Aviation, Science, Life, Learning, Rust, Piloting, Quantum-Computing
Day03 Tokens, Enums and Docstrings

The Day 03 challenge involves the calculating whether a character symbol is adjacent to a part number in a two dimensional map, such as:

467..114..
...*......
..35..633.
......#...
617*......
.....+.58.
..592.....
......755.
...$.*....
.664.598..

and then doing things with the part numbers.

Jan 12, 2024 7 min read Rust, Programming
Day02 Copilot and Vanilla Parsing

After refreshing my knowledge of the rust parsing library ’nom’ with the day01 challenge, I was keen to do the second challenge without, simply using the standard library’s string manipulation and default parsing for this simpler parsing problem.

Jan 7, 2024 5 min read Rust, Programming
Day 01 - a Rust Parsing Exercise With Nom

It’s been quite some time since I’ve taken time to enjoy coding challenges primarily for the fun of it. Over the next months, I’m keen to work my way through the 2023 Advent of Code - a fun set of problems created by Eric Wastl strung together with a seasonal story - and write up a bit about my own learning and fun.

Dec 10, 2023 9 min read Rust, Programming
Advent of Code 2023

Advent of code 2023 - I’ll eventually collect some general info about the libraries that I’m using repeatedly, as well as some other more general learning, but the details are in each post below.

Dec 10, 2023 1 min read Rust, Programming
VMware Take 3 Experience With Rust and DBSP

One of the great aspects of working at a larger company like VMware is that there are programs like Take 3, designed to help people who meet certain criteria to take 3 months on a different project to learn new skills in other contexts and bring those skills and experience back to their team - rather than potentially looking elsewhere for a similar learning experience. This post documents my own recent learning experience of an exciting Take3 project at VMware, with the hope that others may be able to take up the opportunity to learn and bring new skills back to their teams.

Sep 29, 2022 20 min read Programming, Rust, Vmware