Rust's ownership system is well-known for the ways it enforces memory safety guaranteees. For example, you can't use some value after it's been freed. Further, it also ensures that mutability is expli...

Today I ran into an amusingly named place, thanks to some sharp eyes on the OpenStreetMap US Slack. The name of this restaurant is listed as "𝐊𝐄𝐁𝐀𝐁 𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐘𝐀𝐍𝐆𝐎𝐍". That isn't some font tricker...

DNS is a complex beast, so it's little surprise when I learn something new. Today I learned a bit more about the internals of how DNS works at various privacy-centric providers. It all started a few w...

Earlier today, a friend sent me a joke about boycotting <some big evil tech company> for three days: Feb 29, 30, and 31. I thought this was pretty funny. But then, darker thoughts started to for...

Reverse engineering better MapKit tile overlays Despite nearly 15 years of developing iOS apps on a daily basis, it’s occasionally jarring to go back to some of the older APIs. Today's blog is about M...

In my work, I've been doing a lot of ETL pipeline design recently for our geocoding system. The system processes on the order of a billion records per job, and failures are part of the process. We wan...

This isn't so much a TIL as a quick PSA. If you're a Rust developer and need to ensure specific things about your toolchain, the rust-toolchain.toml file is a real gem! I don't quite remember how, but...

In the weeks since my previous post on Working with Arrow and DuckDB in Rust, I've found a few gripes that I'd like to address. Memory usage of query_arrow and stream_arrow In the previous post, I use...

My day job involves wrangling a lot of data very fast. I've heard a lot of people raving about several technologies like DuckDB, (Geo)Parquet, and Apache Arrow recently. But despite being an "ear...

Over the past two weeks, I've been focused on optimizing some data pipelines. I inherited some old ones which seemed especially slow, and I finally hit a limit where an overhaul made sense. The pipeli...