Hi friends!
Neat things I’ve run across in the last month:
Creating microfluidics (tiny pipes) using 3d-printed materials as positive molds. I’ve never worked with microfluidics, but have idly fantasized about whether they could be used to build a carry-on-sized scotch distillery. (Email me if you know about this stuff, or can source tiny oak barrels.)
Detailed code review from 2016 of ripgrep, a Rust implementation of grep. I enjoyed the article as someone who knows the Rust basics, but hasn’t worked on complex designs.
Analysis of Costco: Why it’s great business to sell nuts in 2.5 pound rectangular containers.
As I mentioned in the last update, someone mentioned this Coursera course on the MiniZinc constraint language, and I am glad they did — it’s awesome!
After working through the course, I managed to solve a small version of the shipping puzzle with MiniZinc, which you can see in part III.
From the “I should have done this years ago” department: I looked into optimizing the performance of ClojureScript React templates, and came up with a compiler that:
tl;dr, your templates will be faster because they’ll contain less code — and no code is faster than, well, no code.
Read about that here; the article also includes links to git repositories so you can try it in your own projects.
Someone asked me for advice about what it’s like to do the digital nomad thing. (Since 2017 Oct, my girlfriend and I have lived in Australia, New Zealand, England, Scotland, The Netherlands, Finland, Portugal, Poland, and, uh, California.)
I’m writing an article with general advice around logistics, including our financial overview.
Are there any specific topics or questions you’d like me to address?
Until next time!
Kevin