Tinkering
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Talks

Table of Contents:

RustConf 2023 - Async Building Blocks: A Streaming Data Drama in Three Acts

This talk is an intermediate level tour of some features of the async Rust ecosystem.

Abstract:

Learn how to put together a streaming data system from building blocks in Rust's async ecosystem by following Mary Message on her daring journey to deliver her data. Along the way you'll meet a cast of characters including Pablo PubSub and Beatrix Buffer as you learn about streams, tasks, synchronization, buffering, and the trade offs involved in each.

Slides

NixCon 2023 - Rust + Nix: More than the sum of their parts?

Abstract:

Rust is a programming language with a knack for ergonomics in a space where robustness, correctness, and speed often come at the cost of many papercuts. Nix is a project focused on building software in a robust, correct, and deterministic way. These two projects should be best friends, right? In this talk Zach Mitchell from flox and the Documentation Team will give an experience report writing Rust bindings for Nix. What makes bindings difficult? Which bindings can be autogenerated? Which can (or should) be written by hand? Tune in to find out what went well, what was painful, and what didn't work at all.

Slides

Indy.rs 2022-03-02 - An optimization story

This was a presentation based on the blog post with the same name.

Slides

Rust Belt Rust 2019 - monarch (lightning talk)

This talk was about a testing technique called "metamorphic testing" (note: not the same thing as mutation testing). I wrote a proof of concept testing library called monarch (metamorphic testing -> metamorphosis -> butterflies -> Monarch) based around this technique.

Slides

Indy.rs 2019-06-05 - polsim

This talk was a presentation based on the Polsim - a case study for small-scale scientific computing in Rust post.

Slides.

PyOhio 2018 - Abusing type annotations (lightning talk)

This talk was a demonstration of how you could do something like Rust's procedural macros in Python using decorators to play around with the AST and do code generation. There's even an ASCII-art Clippy! After the talk I wrote a blog post on the topic. This is only the second software talk I'd ever given, so that presentation isn't my best work, but it was a fun topic.

Slides

Indy.rs 2018-04-04 - Cache-friendly Rust

This was my first ever software talk, and probably only my seond time attending Indy.rs. Needless to say I was nervous.

Slides


P.S. - You can follow me on Mastodon at @zmitchell for Rust, Nix, and lukewarm takes.

P.P.S. - If you notice that something could be more accessible, please reach out and I'll do my best to fix it!