Abid Omar

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A brief introduction to Rust

This blog post will take a deep dive into the Rust world of mutability. By deep dive, it means the blog post is considerably long. So it will take time to go through the different examples. The topic we will dive through is specific but we will have to go through various Rust concepts: Ownership/Borrowing, Lifetimes, Unsafe, Sync, Closures, Macros and more. This might be intimidating and I think this is where many developers are put off.

This article assumes some familiarity with Rust; that is if you have successfully run a “Hello World” program, then you are qualified! If you have struggled with some of the hard concepts then this article could be a good introduction. It will not go deep for each one of these but will give you enough knowledge to help you understand the bigger picture.

We will start from a reasonably easy problem: We want to access a particular variable from any...

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The VIM Experience

For the Vim crowd, my .vimrc file is available on Github.

I got introduced to Vim 7 years ago. Getting started with Vim was a challenge. I think it was a typical experience: Vim has a steep learning curve and requires lots of customization to hit that nice spot. There is even a cost to start typing actual text. As I’ve never been introduced to a Vim-like model, my intuition for a text editor is to just start typing. When you opt for a new experience to increase your productivity, it is hard to be convinced to hit a key to start typing. It seemed counter-intuitive.

That made me bail of Vim multiple times. But I always had the inklings to give it another shot. I think a part of it is “jealousy”. Seeing other developers wrangling code in unusual ways, I wanted to have that kind of power. Also, carpal tunnel syndrome is real and I needed to relieve my hands of constant switching.

It is...

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