This is a recap of stuff I read, watched, and studied during the year 2023.

Programming

Books

This year I finally started to learn about Rust. I like how Rust makes you think about abstractions and forces you to try and write better code (I feel guilty when I slap a .clone() in places instead of properly thinking about the ownership model).

Zero to Production in Rust was by far my favorite book of the year. Luca’s approach of implementing a naive solution, understanding why it is naive, and improving on it (or using an abstraction provided by the framework or 3rd party lib) helped me grasp the concepts easily.

coff I’m a translator for Comprehensive Rust 🦀. I helped update the Brazilian Portuguese version of the class. You can contribute to either the translation or the material in our GitHub repo.

Articles

I also wanted to highlight some other written material that was very insightful during this last year.

Projects

This was not a year where I’ve worked on any particular side project. I want to change that going into 2024.

And Beyond

For 2024 I want to do some of the same stuff I did this year: continue reading the blogs I mentioned, and improve my Rust knowledge. I want to take a look at Crafting Interpreters, by Robert Nystrom.

There are two new languages I want to learn about: Go and Scala. From what I’ve heard, these are very different from one another. Go has a very basic type system, and is very familiar with the languages I’m already comfortable with. Scala, on the other hand, seems to have one of the more complex type systems out there. Also, it’s functional, and I’ve been wanting to do a site project in this paradigm.

I also want to learn a build system. Probably Basel, to use some of what I’ve learned in my job. Understanding gRPC more deeply would also be very cool. I would like to learn either some iOS development or React Native. I’m not promising to dive deep into any of these, but I might do an API using Go + gRPC + Bazel (maybe add a mobile client to it).

That’s all I had to say (or had the motivation to write) about the previous year. Thanks for taking the time to read this!