I started writing this post because, for whatever reason, I keep forgetting what the difference is between a ring and a group, which is funny to me because I never forget the difference between a semiring and a semigroup – although other people do, because it’s quite easy to forget! So, I wanted a fast reference to the kinds of algebraic structures that I am most often dealing with in one way or another, usually because I’m writing Haskell (which has some reliance on terminology and structure from abstract algebra and category theory) or I’m trying to read a book about category theory and they keep talking about “groups.” Wikipedia, of course, defines all these structures, and that’s fine, but what I need in those times is more of a refresher than an in-depth explanation.

Why do people keep telling me to use PGP? The answer is that they shouldn’t be telling you that, because PGP is bad and needs to go away.

When people say Rust is a “safe language”, they often mean memory safety.
And while memory safety is a great start, it’s far from all it takes to build robust applications.
Memory safety is important but not sufficient for overall r…

I recently wrote about Async Pool, one of my favorite JavaScript / TypeScript helpers, and today I want to share an even simpler yet extremely useful utility

This blog series creates a small operating system in the Rust programming language. Each post is a small tutorial and includes all needed code.

A somewhat compact implementation of the awk programming language

I’ve used a lot of tools over the years, which means I’ve seen a lot of tools hit a plateau. That’s not always a problem; sometimes …

Most programming language ecosystems provide assert functions in their testing libraries but not Go's. Go's standard testing package follows a more direct and to-the-point approach.

build2 is an open source (MIT), cross-platform build toolchain that aims to approximate Rust Cargo's convenience for developing and packaging C/C++ projects while providing more depth and flexibility, especially in the build system.

Last year I finally decided to learn some Rust. The official book by Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols is excellent, but even after reading it and working on some small code exercises, I felt that I …

Living specification of the IRC protocol. Does not include brand new behavior, just existing behavior present in IRC software and/or networks (new extensions are IRCv3's area).

Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. Hare uses a static type system, manual memory management, and a minimal runtime. It is well-suited to writing operating systems, system tools, compilers, networking software, and other low-level, high performance tasks.