Rodney Lab Newsletter — December 2022Rodney Lab Newsletter — December 2022
🦾 Pick of the Month — Rust #
I started playing with Rust a few years back, but have been taking it a bit more
seriously recently, working my way through the books and various tutorials. Over
the last few months, I have created myriad Rust
CLI
Typical go-to starting points for Rust are “The Book” and also the Rustlings game. Here are a few more resources I found useful recently:
- Building a Rust GraphQL Server: quality content as always from Oliver Jumpertz. You can follow along even if you are new to Rust and although the tutorial is short, he has gone the extra mile with details on setting up observability, reporting and even containerizing with Docker,
- Rust by Example: some content in “The Book” can seem a little abstract, and I find Rust-by-Example super useful to dip into when I am pondering particular issues,
- Zero to Production in Rust: for an even deeper dive, consider this book from Luca Palmieri. It is not free (like the other resources mentioned previously), but is far more ambitious, helping you build out an Email newsletter backend from scratch, with no Rust experience assumed.
Oh, I recently learned you can pull up “The Book” offline if you
have Rust tooling installed on your device, just run “rustup docs --book”.
⌨️ Follower Feedback — Vim here Before #
Seems a few others are also getting into Vim. I mentioned my new setup with
Neovim and Neovide in the last newsletter. If
learning Vim is on your 2023 bucket list, then you might find vimtutor
handy. It’s another CLI tool. I just crack it open like a kind of palette
cleanser when switching between tasks 😅.
📢 Fun Finds #
- Podcasts — Huberman Lab & Stronger by Science: these are both fantastic for when you want to escape Web Development for an hour or two. Dr. Huberman (a Stanford Professor) explores an issue like sleep or motivation over several weekly episodes and in great detail. Despite the scientific tilt, the content is accessible, with practical explanations of how you might apply the science to your own life. If you train, also try Stronger by Science. Again, this links cutting-edge research to practical ways you can alter your diet and training routine.
- Services — Postmark email: with the Revue
newsletter service about to be switched off, I needed another service for
delivering the email version of this newsletter. Although there are a few
options out there; some more bare-bones
APIs
Application Programming Interface while others have a wide range of marketing features, I cannot fault Postmark. Not being too bothered about the marketing side, I just wanted a service with a RESTRepresentational state transfer API which lets you bulk send multipart/alternative email (HTML with a fallback plaintext version). Postmark hit the spot. It literally took a few minutes to set up, the docs are clear and easy to navigate. You can generate the email HTML yourself from your own off-platform template. This is perfect in case you need to switch service at some point. The REST API is also important there too — minimizing code changes if you do need a change. To create the email-compliant HTML, I created an MJMLMailjet Markup Language template (using a Rust WASM function withmrmlto convert this to Email HTML). - Resources — Building Performant Sites: free online book on High Performance Browser Networking by Ilya Grigorik — this got mentioned on a podcast as a great starting point for website optimization. Ilya (now at Shopify and behind Oxygen and Hydrogen) was previously at Google where he worked on making the Web fast! It is stunning how relevant the content remains despite the book being almost ten years old. This is another resource you can dip in and out of when you have a spare ten-minute block throughout the day.
👋🏽 Until next time! #
All the best for 2023! Hope there was something valuable in here for you. As always, reach out with feedback and until next time, here’s some of my 2022 posts/tutorial highlights: