rossabaker.com

A perfectly cromulent developer

Old man yells at Internet

Ross A. Baker, glasses sliding down his nose, shakes his fist at a Windows 95 Internet icon.
Figure 1: Ross A. Baker, bottom right, champions a return to a more personal Web.

INDIANAPOLIS — Railing against “billionaire broligarchs,” local curmudgeon Ross A. Baker launched a broadside against the modern Internet in a feisty defense of the IndieWeb.

“Back in my day, we had personal web sites!” Baker published to his own domain. “We owned our content, our tools, our platform. Not some algorithm, hoovering up our data just to serve back slop.”

He lamented the Web’s homogenization. “It’s supposed to be eclectic. One real connection an some arcane interest is worth a thousand likes.”

Baker’s rant on open protocols was cut short by a more pressing question: whether he could smoke a pork shoulder from within Emacs.

What’s he building in there?

#code2025

published

We’re all tired of year in review. “Happy arbitrary point in Earth’s orbit,” an old friend used to say. But the #codeYYYY post remains one of my favorite birdsite traditions.

This year I began to pivot to Rust and Python, but still managed to dabble in a lot. Next year will be about refinement.

Rust Book, Chapter 2: Programming a Guessing Game

published

Chapter Two introduces a wide range of Rust constructs to build something a little more substantial than Hello, World. In this post, we’ll try to map Rust’s approach to mutability, error handling, and side effects to val=/=var, Either, and IO. None of these mappings is perfect, because the two languages diverge in more than syntax, but much remains familiar.