Secret Weblog

I announce Xee, the implementation of XPath and XSLT in Rust that I've been working on for the last two years.

Once every while I use this blog to look for new challenges! Let me give a brief description of who I am, what I can do, and what I enjoy doing. …

An overview of a class of data structures I didn't know about!

"Don't Repeat Yourself", abbreviated DRY, is a mantra I subscribe to as a programmer. I don't want to have the same code in multiple parts of the codebase. Part of the reason is just reuse: if I can reuse code, it's just easier. Repetitive code is also difficult to maintain - if it's in multiple places, a change may mean I need to update multiple places, which is tedious and mistake prone. A more subtle reason to try to avoid repetition is because doing so is design pressure to come up with a succinct, effective expression of what you are trying to implement, in other words, it encourages you to create useful abstractions. So, DRY! …