Coder's Log

As most folks who know me already know, I've been in love with Rust language for a few years now and in the last year I've been actively coding in Rust. I wanted to document my journey to how I came to love this programming language, in hope that it will help people to see the value Rust brings to the world of software but if not, it would be nice to have my reason documented for my own sake. When I started my professional career as a programmer 16 years ago, I knew some C, C++, Java and a bit of x86 assembly but it didn't take long before I completely forgot most of what I knew of C++ and Java, and completely focused on C. There were a few difference reasons that contributed to that: Working with very limited embedded systems (I'm talking 8051 ) at that time, I quickly became obsessed with performance and C was my best bet if I didn't want to write all my code in assembly. Shortly before I graduated, I got involved in GStreamer project and beca...

I have been meaning to document my experience of moving to Berlin, mainly to help people who are considering to move or are about to move. However I'm lazy and unless I'm paid to do so, I just won't get around to doing that so instead of ending up posting nothing, I'll just quickly list all the advice I have here: Don't actually order any services through check24 website. Only use them to compare prices etc. Avoid Vodafone for broadband connection. Follow this thread for why. Consider using an online bank, like N26. For your Anmeldung, go to Bürgeramt in Neukölln or Kreuzberg (unless you speak German). book appointment around noon or be prepared to wait a month. Make sure you have local friends who speak German and are willing to help you out. Many locals will tell you that you don't need German in Berlin but that is simply not true. Either consider hiring an estate agent or make sure your temporary residence allows you to register on their address...

Well, no, not really but maybe I'll be able to claim that at some point because I'm moving to Berlin to join Kinvolk. I'm told that I'm changing countries and companies too often but that's not true. I was at Red Hat for 5 years and at Nokia before that for 5 years as well. The decision to move out of Finland was not exactly mine. Regarding Pelagicore I'm not as much leaving Pelagicore as I'm leaving the automotive industry, more specifically the software side of it. While the automotive industry is changing and mostly for the good, I realized that it still is not a place for me. Things typically move very slowly in this industry and I realized that I don't have the required patience for it. Also, C++/Qt are big here and while an year ago I thought it's just another language and Open Source UI framework, I no longer think so. Since you can find a lot of rants from very experienced C++ developers on why C++ is a horrible language, I won't rant...

For gps-share to be useful to people, it needs to be tested against various GPS dongles. If you have a GPS dongle, I'd appreciate it if you could test gps-share. If you don't use the hardware, please consider donating it to me and that way I'll ensure that it keeps working with gps-share. Thanks!

So yesterday, I rolled out the first release of gps-share. gps-share is a utility to share your GPS device on local network. It has two goals: Share your GPS device on the local network so that all machines in your home or office can make use of it. Enable support for standalone (i-e not part of a cellular modem) GPS devices in Geoclue. Since Geoclue has been able to make use of network NMEA sources since 2015, gps-share works out of the box with Geoclue. The latter means that it is a replacement for GPSD and Gypsy . While "why not GPSD?" has already been documented , Gypsy has been unmaintained for many years now. I did not feel like reviving a dead project and I really wanted to code in Rust language so I decided to create gps-share. Dependencies While cargo manages the Rust crates gps-share depend on, you'll also need the following on your host: libdbus libudev libcap xz-libs Supported devices gps-share currently only supports GPS devices tha...

In the light of my latest fascination with Rust programming language, I've started to make small presentation about Rust at my office , since I'm not the only one at our company who is interested in Rust. My first presentation in Feb was about a very general introduction to the language but at that time I had not yet really used the language for anything real myself so I was a complete novice myself and didn't have a very good idea of how memory management really works. While working on my gps-share project in my limited spare time, I came across quite a few issues related to memory management but I overcame all of them with help from kind folks at #rust-beginners IRC channel and the small but awesome Rust-GNOME community. Having learnt some essentials of memory management, I thought I share my knowledge/experience with folks at the office. The talk was not well-attended due to conflicts with other meetings at office but the few folks who attended were very interested an...

While I'm known as a Vala fanboy in GNOME, I've tried to stress time and again that I see Vala as more a practical solution than an ideal one. "Safe programming" has always been something that intrigued me, having dealt with numerous crashes and other hard-to-debug runtime issues in the past. So when I first heard of Rust some years back, it got me super excited but it was not exactly stable  and there was no integration with GNOME libraries or D-Bus and hence it was not at all a viable option for developing desktop code. Lately (in past 2 years) things have significantly changed. Not only we have Rust 1.0 but we also have crates that provide integration with GNOME libraries and D-Bus . On top of that, some of us took steps to start converting some C code into Rust and many of us started seriously talking with Rust hackers to make Rust a first class programming language for GNOME. To make things really go foward, we decided to arrange a hackfest , which took place ...

Are you a student? Passionate about Open Source? Want your code to run on next generation of automobiles? You're in luck! Genivi Development Platform will be participating in Google Summer of Code this summer and you are welcome to participate. We have collected a bunch of ideas for what would be a good 3 month project for a student but you're more than welcome to suggest your own project. The ideas page , also has instructions on how to get started with GDP. We look forward to your participation!