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Practical frontend philosophy

Published: 29 September 2021
Tags: philosophy

I constantly hear about frontend engineers getting a bunch of crap for not being "real" programmers. As a non-frontend guy who has dabbled extensively in the field, that sounds like a bunch of BS to me. In this philosophical article, Jared Gorski explores some of the diffiiculties of frontend engineering and building human-data interfaces. Although I don't agree with all of his points (I don't think backend is often obvious), Jared highlights a couple of important points in regards to the difficulties of making data palpable for humans.

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Looking into convergent encryption

Published: 25 October 2021
Tags: encryption

In regards to tech, privacy has taken center stage as one of the main issues in the past couple of years. Encryption is often times touted as a great solution for keeping user information private, but how does that work with services that might have to store unimaginable amounts of data, where a 5% decreases in size could save millions of dollars? Ayende Rahien's article looks at how convergent encryption produces the same result with different encryption keys, in the aim of deduplicating data storage.

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Borrowing Trouble: The Difficulties Of A C++ Borrow-Checker

Published: 10 September 2021
Tags: cpp

Rust has a borrow checker. What does it do? Basically enforces certain rules, like that all variables are initialized before they are used, that you can't move the same value twice, that you can't move a value while it is borrowed, that you can't access a place while it is mutably borrowed (except through the reference), that you can't mutate a place while it is immutably borrowed, and more. The authors of this article (emails listed at top of article) detail an implementation of a borrow checker system at compile time in C++.