Dan's thoughts

Dan's thoughts

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Advent of Code 2024 Day 3 - Odin

Advent of Code 2024 Day 3 - Odin

Previously I've done day1 and day2 in Zig. But day 3 rolled around, and it begs for regular expressions! ⚠️Uh, spoilers, I guess. Anyway, Zig doesn't have any regular expressions, and the library I found does not support captures. So instead of finding another library that

People checking what looks like legal documents

Advent of Code 2024 in Zig - Day 2

Onwards to day 2, we're looking at reports! If you want to check the previous day, linkie below 👇 Advent of Code 2024 in Zig - Day 1Inspired by my brother’s post about his efforts solving AOC with Rust, I thought I’d share my adventure with Zig.

reindeer composed of christmas lights

Advent of Code 2024 in Zig - Day 1

Inspired by my brother's post about his efforts solving AOC with Rust, I thought I'd share my adventure with Zig. I decided to choose Zig because I wanted to get into manual-memory-managed-land. I have solved some days in the previous years using Go, Clojure, and Rust,

Your personal knowledge management system does not work because you don’t have personal knowledge to manage

Your personal knowledge management system does not work because you don’t have personal knowledge to manage

It’s not about the app. Switching to Obsidian won’t help. Using super-templates in Notion is not the answer. The tool does not matter. The problem is that we have nothing to put into the tool. If we had, the tool wouldn’t be an obstacle. Instead we’re

Handcrafted media is coming

Handcrafted media is coming

I'm sitting at an airport, sipping a cappuccino, waiting for my flight to board. I'm mostly in my head, thinking about various bits and bobs, house renovation, project at work, stuff like that, when my eyes rest on two huge TVs playing the same three ads

Cropped image of the book "Never Split The Difference", showing these words front and center

Never Split The Difference

Have you ever thought "Man I wish I could negotiate"? Have I got a book recommendation for you!

Image of the book Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

Make Time - a book review

I bought "Make Time" 4 months ago, mostly because I felt that I never have time to do what I really want to do. Since then I have picked it up and consequently forgot about having read some of it twice already, in a way proving my own

Cropped image of the book "The Checklist Manifesto" by Atul Gawande

A book in review: Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

Some thoughts on "The Checklist Manifesto" by Atul Gawande, mainly the key takeaways, but also why you should read it.

Iron chain with rust with the sun peeking through one of the links

A different dependency injection in Rust

I just blew my own mind, accidentally. This is a short little thingamabob about injecting dependencies. But not like that. I come from a primarily Java background. I dabbled in Go and currently write a bunch in Python for backend and js/ts for frontend. Yet I still carry with

World map drawn from polygons

First explore, then nail it down

I've been having a bit of trouble writing Rust recently. I've been second guessing myself a lot about whether choosing it for a side project was a good idea. The reason for that is that I'm creating something that I've never done

Silhouette of a signpost pointing in many directions, with the sky in sunset colours in the background

You can't understand the value proposition from outside

This has been brewing for quite a while. I've witnessed many debates on programming languages - which is better, which is worse, how dumb you are for choosing one against the other. And while I think that there is merit to these conversations - to some, at least

Person working on a laptop at a desk

How much work do we actually work?

This past two weeks I've been off work - yearly PTO and everything. In that time, doing some personal project, I've been contemplating about work - the things we have to do and the things we do enjoy. What better way to spend Christmas, right? I

Lots of differently colored balls from a ball pit

Let’s talk about generics

Go is getting generics in 1.18, with half the devs loving and half of them hating the idea. What are they good for, really?

A foundation stone on top of reddish dirt

Year of Foundation

Foundations, foundations everywhere. In this one there's a bit about what I have planned as a personal improvement theme for 2022, from health through writing to programming

On yearly themes

Yearly Themes Featured

On yearly themes

The one about how new years resolutions are bad and how you can do better for yourself