Rust

I've been spending the start of the week learning Rust. I opted for O'Reilly's Programming Rust initially as it closely follows UPenn's CIS198 (problem sets FTW), but has since switched to the Rust book as I'm finding the style a bit more fun.

Content: Innovation tokens

I knew Dan McKinley's Choose Boring Technology post would feature on my content list. I especially love the framing of innovation tokens, and how you have to choose your battles.

https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

What caught me by surprise re-reading it today is how it feels less clear what's considered as spending those tokens. NodeJS is widely used, and I found out recently Stripe uses MongoDB for core parts of its key-value infrastructure (cue "is your database web scale" jokes).

My experience with the supposedly battle-tested Airflow hasn't been positive. We employed a number of workarounds to get it to play nice for long-running (~8 hours) ML model training on containers. We ended up partly moving to a scheduler built in-house (for model training jobs), before moving wholesale (plus ETLs) to Argo. Sure Argo is built for k8s, but the sense with Airflow was "it shouldn't be this painful"...

It's hard to disagree with the principle, as per the post, that one should always consider cost-benefit trade-offs carefully. That said it does seem a lot simpler in the abstract. Is Rust sufficiently boring?

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