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brson.github.io
Personal blog · brson.github.ioprogrammingsystems
brson.github.io is a personal blog at brson.github.io about programming and systems. Since 2013, 33 different Hacker News readers have linked it 51 times, most often “How Rust is tested”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-11-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- How Rust is tested4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-07-10
- Dave Herman’s contributions to Rust4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-05-02
- Fireflowers – The Rust Programming Language, in the words of its practitioners3 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2017-01-18
- The Minimally-Nice Open Source Software Maintainer (2017)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-07-16
- Unconditional loops are unconditionally awesome3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-01-17
- /2013/03/10/embedding-rust-in-ruby/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-08-09
- /error-chain/error_chain/index.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-11-11
- The Rust Cookbook2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-03-03
- The End of Unsafety: The Past, Present, and Future of the Rust2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-04-17
- The Minimally-Nice Open Source Software Maintainer2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-04-06
What Hacker News says?
In a similar vein, one of the articles that has more influenced my interactions has been The Minimally-nice OSS Maintainer [0]. It doesn't produce an instant slipstream where all your collaboration is suddenly super-fluid, but niceness does help reduce those abrasive moments which, in my experience, can slow a community down a lot more than working well speeds it up. It goes hand-in-hand with good community curation…
Comment linking /2017/04/05/minimally-nice-maintainer
on “Kindness is Underrated (2014)”Submitted Dave Herman’s contributions to Rust as a story · 641 points
HN discussionfor FOSS the reference implementation is co-created by the consumers of the software. the users will only accept a new release if it fits their functional needs and passes their verifications. the Linux kernel, the toolchain, or libraries like ssl libs are co created by the very organisations that consume the software. FB, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM with red hat, Suse, Oracle, SAP they all concrete the Linux ker…
Comment linking /2017/07/10/how-rust-is-tested
on “Volvo is using Rust for its in-vehicle software”Submitted How Rust is tested as a story · 299 points
HN discussionVery cool! Took me a while to find the rendered version, though: https://brson.github.io/rust-cookbook/
Comment linking /rust-cookbook/
on “Rust's language ergonomics initiative”Submitted The Minimally-Nice Open Source Software Maintainer as a story · 224 points
HN discussionPersonally I love Rust's error handling, but I do think that I understand your perspective. At least part of your objections would seem to be addressed by the combination of the ? operator to make it trivial to do the equivalent of re-throwing inline, and the error-chain crate, which can make exception-like stack traces/etc trivial to implement. https://brson.github.io/error-chain/error_chain/index.html
Comment linking /error-chain/error_chain/index.html
on “Rust and the Future of Systems Programming [video]”Submitted The Minimally-Nice Open Source Software Maintainer as a story · 40 points
HN discussionWe had a large community discussion about this last year: https://brson.github.io/fireflowers/
Comment linking /fireflowers/
on “A Little Story About the `yes` Unix Command”Submitted Rust's Most Unrecognized Contributor as a story · 35 points
HN discussionI think this highlights that while there are easy solutions to the problem the OP faced, they're difficult for a newcomer to discover. (I have been using Rust for a couple of months and I'd also have reached for serde and maybe serde_derive to solve the problem). Hopefully this is something the Libz Blitz[0] will solve with their Rust Cookbook[1]. (You could almost but not quite arrive at as simple a solution from c…
Comment linking /rust-cookbook/intro.html
on “My Struggles with Rust”Submitted The Minimally-Nice Open Source Software Maintainer as a story · 25 points
HN discussion`?` will convert the original error to the one the caller returns so you can implement the decoration in the conversion if that's suitable, otherwise `Result#map_err` lets you convert an error "at the callsite" (and is a noop if there was no error). Alternatively, you can use error_chain: https://brson.github.io/error-chain/error_chain/index.html .
Comment linking /error-chain/error_chain/index.html
on “Announcing Rust 1.13”Submitted First impressions of Rust programming on Solana as a story · 14 points
HN discussion> The best advantage of writing libraries in C is that it allows the library to be usable via FFIs in many other languages. Rust has allowed this for over a year at this point. For example, see the (old) blog post "Embedding Rust in Ruby": http://brson.github.io/2013/03/10/embedding-rust-in-ruby/
Comment linking /2013/03/10/embedding-rust-in-ruby/
on “Cross-platform Rust Rewrite of the GNU Coreutils”Submitted Unconditional loops are unconditionally awesome as a story · 10 points
HN discussionBrian Anderson (AKA brson, who as it happens used to head up the Rust project) wrote a good piece back in 2017 called "The Minimally-nice Open Source Software Maintainer" which has tips to reduce burnout/disillusionment in junior contributors. It's less geared toward preventing burnout at the top, but still well worth a read, and there's no reason much of it couldn't be applied in reverse. https://brson.github.io/20…
Comment linking /2017/04/05/minimally-nice-maintainer
on “The Rust project has a burnout problem”Submitted Powerletters for Rust as a story · 4 points
HN discussionWe had a big community discussion about this topic last year: https://brson.github.io/fireflowers/
Comment linking /fireflowers/
on “Why you should, actually, rewrite some of it in Rust”Submitted The End of Unsafety: The Past, Present, and Future of Rust as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> engines might always be done in C/C++ simply because it > gives them the ability to easily make bindings to the > majority of languages Just like C++, it will be possible to expose a C-compatible interface to Rust code that will allow any language that can call into C to call into a library written in Rust. See http://brson.github.io/2013/03/10/embedding-rust-in-ruby/ for a rather dated proof-of-concept, or http:/…
Comment linking /2013/03/10/embedding-rust-in-ruby/
on “New Rust runtime turned on. What next?”Submitted Unconditional Loops Are Unconditionally Awesome as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThank you for linking that. I always imagined that ruby and c were worlds apart, and that it took a crazy level of mastery to make them work together. That thought led me to this article about embedding rust in ruby http://brson.github.io/2013/03/10/embedding-rust-in-ruby/
Comment linking /2013/03/10/embedding-rust-in-ruby/
on “C for Rubyists”Submitted First impressions of NEAR smart contract development in Rust as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI agree with you, for sure. We had a huge community discussion about this in 2016: https://brson.github.io/fireflowers/
Comment linking /fireflowers/
on “Rust – Compile Time Memory Safety”Submitted The Rust Cookbook as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis reminds me of http://brson.github.io/archaea/ , which is a really fantastic project by Brian Anderson. It shows iterations of Rust's test files over the years, so you can see what older Rust syntax looked like. Regardless, very cool!
Comment linking /archaea/
on “Evolution of Rust Compiler Errors”Submitted The End of Unsafety: The Past, Present, and Future of the Rust as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttps://brson.github.io/fireflowers/ for example
Comment linking /fireflowers/
on “Ada: a C Developer's Perspective”Submitted Powerletters for Rust as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
