It's been a larger sequence of events until I got hired, but it all started by having shared a little side project[1] here that hit the front page in 2016.
Back then, Zach[2] from Timber.io reached out to me since they had just recently launched a startup in the logging space. We had a good exchange, but didn't get to work together. (I was burned out from my job and wanted to go back to university to study computer science, and felt that accepting "yet another job" wouldn't give me the perspective and foundational knowledge I was looking for. So I proposed a ridiculous rate that they understandably declined.)
However, we kept in touch over the years and I had good memories from our conversations.
During my studies, I fell in love with Rust. When I finished my bachelor's degree in 2020, I was looking for jobs in Rust that were specifically not in the blockchain/crypto currency industry (disqualifying at least 90% of the postings I had seen). Then Vector[3] caught my eye – a project by Timber.io. So I reached out to Zach again, and even though I had been fairly inexperienced in Rust, they took a shot on me. Eventually, Timber.io got bought by Datadog in 2021, and I sticked around until the end of 2022. After that, I was fully focused on finishing my master's degree.
To close the circle, I ended up founding a new company with Zach at the beginning of this year. We're still in stealth, but working on open source real-time video communication. If you're interested in tackling hard challenges in infrastructure/networking/native UI with Rust, please feel free to reach out – we have some open positions and I would love to reach for the same community that has once so openly accepted me.
> and studying computer science doesn't grant you the title of "Ingenieur" anyway
That's not correct. E.g., consider the relevant section in the Bavarian engineering law[1] (using Google Translate):
> The job title engineer alone or in a word combination may use,
> (1) Anyone who has successfully completed an undergraduate degree at a state or state-recognized German university
> a) in a technical-scientific subject,
> b) which has a standard period of study of at least six full-time semesters and with which at least 180 points can be acquired using the ECTS system and
> c) in which the areas of mathematics, computer science, natural sciences and technology predominate; this requirement does not apply to people who have completed an undergraduate degree in industrial engineering and only use the professional title in the word combination industrial engineer
Further, my diploma for a Bachelor's in Computer Science from TUM contains the passage:
> The graduate is entitled to employ the designation Engineer alone or as part of a compound word.
Hm, that's an interesting choice. I also wonder why they didn't use an encoding that has an alphabet with 2^n characters (that way you can directly map 1 charater to n bits when decoding).
Coincidentally, I've just finished some work on a project[1] that is in the same space (identifiers for images).
For the reasons you pointed out, I found Douglas Crockford's base32[2] encoding to be a good fit.
I have an image library of around ~15,000 RAW photo images, which I wanted to organize. After having tried several approaches over the years (organizing them in folders by topic, by year, or some mix of the two...) I gave up and went to build a solution that scales better.
ciid is a CLI utility, which you can use to rename image files, so that you can fearlessly merge folders without having to worry about duplicate file names.
The derived identifiers are structured in such a way that if you sort them alphabetically, the images will also be sorted chronologically. Additionally, the identifier can later be used to verify the integrity of the image.
If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer.
I've been working on a very similar framework[1], but wasn't satisfied with the ergonomics enough to release it.
My plans were to extend the Swift compiler with JSX-like syntax[2] that makes use of the declarative framework. Of course that's still possible, especially now with a canonical "Apple" way of building declarative interfaces in Swift.
I'm a bit sad that with the announcement of SwiftUI my implementation will not stand a chance anymore, but I definitely learned a lot along the way how declarative rendering and reconcilation works in detail.
Bottom line - this is very great news for native app development, declarative UI makes it vastly more easy to reason about code.
Currently starting to build a native macOS/iOS/watchOS productivity app, therefore picking up Swift.
I'm coming from web development - and feel a bit stuck on how to layout things with Xcode / Swift. I'm not convinced by the graphical way to build interfaces provided by Interface Builder / Storyboards, as they feel quite limited in terms of precise control, dynamic layout, no duplication and use with VCS.
Optimally there would be something like React to build interfaces declaratively.
Does anyone have some insight into this topic?
(Also: why are variable declarations so implicit in Swift? When importing a package all its exported variables are avaliable within the file, making code really hard to read in my opinion.)
Assuming I am looking at your sketch with the x-axis being time, I just want to note that specific to this library there won't be two events (request start, end or log) at the same time. (The "concurrency" here comes from coroutines, not parallel threads)
Sorry, I couldn't quite follow - could you break it down in simple sentences what the connection between those links you provided and the visualization is?
The coloring depending on response time happens in intervals, that much I can say.
Any plans on releasing a version that is not tied to the apple ecosystem? ("super/windows" vs "option", "command" vs "alt") Why are those not configurable, as well?
I wrote this mainly for the need of better debugging in development, and never inspected live traffic on a production server.
If you balance your application across servers/workers and keep the log on a per-worker basis I think there shouldn't be a problem in doing so.
Otherwise - you could make a middleware that collects requests that require attention (response time above some threshold, non-200 status codes, errors).
Then you could "replay" the logger on those requests.
(You can't do it live, since you can't know in advance which requests will be of interest.)
Maybe I find a way to incorporate this into the project, so that you can use it out of the box :-)
Back then, Zach[2] from Timber.io reached out to me since they had just recently launched a startup in the logging space. We had a good exchange, but didn't get to work together. (I was burned out from my job and wanted to go back to university to study computer science, and felt that accepting "yet another job" wouldn't give me the perspective and foundational knowledge I was looking for. So I proposed a ridiculous rate that they understandably declined.)
However, we kept in touch over the years and I had good memories from our conversations.
During my studies, I fell in love with Rust. When I finished my bachelor's degree in 2020, I was looking for jobs in Rust that were specifically not in the blockchain/crypto currency industry (disqualifying at least 90% of the postings I had seen). Then Vector[3] caught my eye – a project by Timber.io. So I reached out to Zach again, and even though I had been fairly inexperienced in Rust, they took a shot on me. Eventually, Timber.io got bought by Datadog in 2021, and I sticked around until the end of 2022. After that, I was fully focused on finishing my master's degree.
To close the circle, I ended up founding a new company with Zach at the beginning of this year. We're still in stealth, but working on open source real-time video communication. If you're interested in tackling hard challenges in infrastructure/networking/native UI with Rust, please feel free to reach out – we have some open positions and I would love to reach for the same community that has once so openly accepted me.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12830763
[2] https://zach.sh
[3] https://vector.dev