Rustlab 2024

It was a long time ago, and I couldn’t write anything longer than would fit in a toot. It is weird because that was my first conference, and it felt awesome to be one of two hundred geeks who truly care about their craft. I enjoyed the entire experience.

The workshop part was awesome (I ran out of positive adjectives). In the first session, I developed my shell, which can execute commands, change the current directory, and perform basic logic and grouping. In the second session, I created a TUI chat client using RatatUI. I had a great time working on them. The workshops were the best part of the conference, and I really look forward to the next one.

Then, there were two days of cool presentations. I haven’t taken any notes, and looking back, I see that they would help me write this post. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have enjoyed the presentations as much if I had been distracted by note-taking. So yeah, no regrets.

In the opening presentation, Tim Clicks talked about ways to improve software quality. One of the techniques he mentioned was fuzing. At home I scrolled through the photo roll and found the library name he was using.

I maintain a markdown flavor/parser. This blog uses it, and I know one more person who at least tried to use it. Hi Augustin 🖖. I wouldn’t say that it’s a battle-tested piece of software, but it’s pretty solid and has never panicked on me. It has 100% code coverage and is written in Rust (by the way, TM). I am telling you all that not to brag about how cool it is (maybe a little) but to illustrate my confidence in it. I was very confident that YAMD had no obvious bugs. And you know what? Cargo-fuzz library found three bugs in less than a second. I’m very impressed and highly recommend incorporating fuzing into your workflow.

One of the most unexpected and positive outcomes for me was the one I got from Cooking Parsers with Winnit by Santiago Fraire Willemoes. His story about creating a new language to describe cooking recipes inspired me to keep working on YAMD. It’s not that I lacked inspiration to do so, but at times it felt pointless. There are plenty of markdown parsers and flavors available. I could use one of them, as I always have, and it would be perfectly fine. Seeing in person that I’m not the only one reinventing the wheel adds meaning to the whole enterprise. I don’t know how that works.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time and energy to explore the city, but the venue was a 20-minute walk from my hotel. I experienced enough of Florence to be certain that I will return someday. And, as a note to myself, next time I should take at least one day before and after conference. It was tough with traveling.