I find a lot of cool articles around the internet, and inspired by some other weekly links collections I’ve come across recently, I thought I’d start my own little bloglet.

This week

• You don’t need analytics on your blog: A good reminder for indie bloggers out there to remember why you’re writing — chasing higher audience numbers can be demotivating and futile if you’re writing for your own enjoyment.
• Emacs From Scratch, Part 1: Foundations: I really am loving how this series is introducing Emacs concepts in a slow drip. I’ve used Doom Emacs whenever I’ve dipped my toes in, but this series might give me the confidence to make a go of it on my own.
• NixOS & Flakes Book: One of the first things you’ll learn about Nix is that the documentation is byzantine, to say the least. This book/website is refreshingly straightforward: explaining concepts like Flakes in-depth which the official docs don’t even touch on. I run Nix on my macOS systems and haven’t touched NixOS yet, but the book has still been full of great insights and tips.
• Sam Altman’s Knack for Dodging Bullets: I was more than a little intrigued by the OpenAI drama a few weeks back, and I’m interested to see how those few days in November are unpacked and reported on more and more over the next few months.

From the vault

Eventually the Weekly will just be links from the current week, but while I’m getting started I’ll also include some links “from the vault”.

• The Rust I Wanted Had No Future: Graydon Hoare describes the direction he would have taken Rust if he had truly been the BDFL for the language. In a lot of ways it is not what I would expect given where Rust has ended up.

  What stuck with me the most was Graydon’s objections to how library-defined iterators interact with the generics system and led in part to Rust’s infamously slow compile times. It gave me more respect and understanding for Go’s built-in container types and reluctance to release generics.