Lately I've been programming with Rust quite a bit. In my opinion, the language shows careful, thoughtful design in almost every decision point of its development. The syntax, semantics, standard library, and tooling are all truly top-notch (and a welcome change from my C++ work). I've also used Rust deeply enough to encounter the edges which aren't so smooth. Async code (using the Rust Future trait) can especially present difficult cases at times, like when dealing with more complicated lifetimes and when you want to be able to take parameterized futures (i.e. future generators) as arguments.

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I've been developing with C++ very extensively for the past year or so. Most of this development has been on heavily optimized codepaths, using modern C++17 practices. After creating a few developer interfaces, I realized that I was taking a similar general approach to interface architecture.

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Web development has become a fast-moving, ever changing landscape of frameworks, technologies, and best practices. Approaching a new web development project can often be daunting, as rapid advancements quickly polarize various communities and everyone's advice can be conflicting. Which frontend framework is best (for varying definitions of "best")? Which server package can support the performance constraints of your project? Which build tools, bundling tools, and source languages should you use? I've gathered many opinions and preferences about these questions myself, but decided to take a step back to evaluate what benefits these complex systems provide.

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A while back I was struck with the idea to make a low-power, solar-driven e-ink display with WiFi connectivity, so that I could hang it in a window and have information periodically update on it. In particular, an immediately useful function it could perform was showing the weather forecast (forecast accuracy aside). It turns out that these displays, while very easy to acquire due to the popularity of Amazon Kindles, are a bit tricky to drive. In particular, there aren't any publicly-available documents that detail how they work with enough information to get exactly what you want on the screen.

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In C#, interfaces can only specify public properties and functions. However, especially when making libraries to be used by other projects, it is often beneficial to have internal interfaces (specifying functions that should also be marked internal, rather than public). Below is an outline of how to get this sort of desired visibility for internal interfaces, as well as convenient syntax for using internal interface methods.

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The WIX framework is excellent for building installers and deploying software for Windows, however there's some functionality that is left to be desired, especially when it comes to deploying projects and ensuring that everything that project needs is bundled. The WIX heat tool can do some helpful things for your deployment, but if you don't want all your projects to build into a single directory, and then use that directory when invoking heat, you need something a bit smarter.

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Anyone who has programmed using the WPF framework for a while eventually runs into its limitations. In my opinion, the framework is great overall; it offers many advantages over WinForms, and for little extra overhead. However, the limitation of {x:Type} to only reference classes that are direct descendants of a namespace was bothering me, so I made a markup extension to overcome the issue.

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The Intel Integrated Performance Primitives (IPP) libraries are excellent optimized libraries for Intel architectures that can really boost the speed of complex operations. Intel supplies them for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX, and they also include optimizations specific to each Intel processor architecture. However, you should be cautious when using them in a Cygwin environment; they will work just fine, but the "default" usage won't work as expected.

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I needed a VPN client in NixOS (the operating system I've installed and have been using on my work machine) that would work with my company's VPN. Unfortunately, neither openfortivpn nor strongswan worked, but I was told by some coworkers that libreswan was working well. The libreswan package didn't yet exist in the main NixOS nixpkgs repository, so I took it upon myself to add it in! Along the way I also learned about the nix expression language and the community behind both nix and NixOS.

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At work I received a new laptop, and installed linux on it. However, I needed to continue .NET development some of the time, and Visual Studio doesn't play nicely with Wine. So I decided I would run Windows 7 from a virtual machine. This is all well and good, but I didn't want to get another license for it when I already had it installed on the hard drive! While this might be against the terms of the license (I haven't checked), technically the installed Windows 7 copy could only be run as a single instance at any given time. So with some finagling, I was able to get VirtualBox to point to the existing install of Windows 7. There are also purportedly some significant I/O speedups when using VirtualBox directly with a hard drive rather than from a file on the host system.

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