One of my friends, an outstanding programmer who likes to fly under the radar, frequently tells me he admires my “ability to broadcast”. I guess he refers to the fact that I’m keeping a blog, and that I’m not afraid of writing with transparency about my adventures in software engineering. To me, it all feels natural, so his comment motivated me to explain in more detail why I’m doing what I’m doing.| Adolfo Ochagavía
Today marks 10 years since my first pull request to the Rust compiler. Though I’m no open source legend, to me it’s an important date still. As I’ve mentioned in the past, my involvement in Rust was pivotal to my development as a software engineer, so I can’t let this day pass without a mention in my blog! How did it happen that I, a bored student yearning to learn interesting stuff, ended up contributing to Rust?| Adolfo Ochagavía
Since starting out as an independent contractor, I’ve always felt a tension between being a generalist software engineer, yet having to market myself as a specialist. I’ve been wanting to write about it for years and even have kept some notes for that purpose. Recently I came across an article by Ben Collins-Sussman, which gave me the last bit of inspiration I needed, even though his article only indirectly touches on the topic.| Adolfo Ochagavía
How many roads must a programmer walk down before you call them a contractor? It’s been about three years since I went down this (bumpy) path, and I finally have the feeling that my contracting business is “bootstrapped”1. Here’s an account of my journey so far, hoping you find it inspiring! 0. Contents Articles about contracting and freelancing usually take the form of abstract advice: how to find clients, how much you should charge, etc.| Adolfo Ochagavía
Since my time at the university, pursuing a Computer Science degree, I have always been fascinated by programming languages and the tooling around them: compilers, IDEs, package managers, etc. Eventually, that got me involved as a hobbyist in the development of the Rust compiler and rust-analyzer, but I never got the chance to work professionally on programming language tooling… until two months ago! In January, the nice folks at prefix.dev asked me to help them develop the rattler package ...| Adolfo Ochagavía
In December 2021, a company from San Francisco asked me to port a Rust library to Java. The task seemed simple, but it ended up requiring a from-scratch implementation of the MySQL protocol and even fixing a bug in the main Rust MySQL client! Below follows an account of the adventure. The task Originally, the idea was to port the msql-srv library from Rust to Java. For context, msql-srv makes it possible to create a fake MySQL/MariaDB server, which accepts MySQL connections and handles them w...| Adolfo Ochagavía
