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Highlights

• I think about how I can do a better job delegating product decisions and documentation.
• I compare my experience learning Nix to learning Zig.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

When I work in my own repositories these days, I always add a Nix flake to the repo so that I can spin up a working development environment on any system with a single command.

What do I do when I’m working in someone else’s repo and they don’t want to adopt Nix flakes?

Normally, I’d just add the file to my copy of the repo and gitignore it locally so I don’t commit my personally-specific files with the rest of my changes.

Zig is a new, independently developed low-level programming language. It’s a modern reimagining of C that attempts to retain C’s performance while embracing improvements from the last 30 years of tooling and language design.

Zig makes calling into C code easier than any other language I’ve used. Zig also treats unit testing as a first-class feature, which the C language certainly does not.

These two properties of Zig create an interesting opportunity: Zig allows you to add unit tests to existing C code. You can do this without rewriting any of your C code or build logic.

Zig is a new, open-source programming language designed to replace C. I’m still a Zig beginner, so I’m trying to learn the language by using Zig to rewrite parts of existing C applications.

One of the first challenges I encountered with Zig is understanding strings. I couldn’t find detailed documentation about how Zig strings work when calling C code, so I’m sharing my findings in case they’re helpful to others who want to use Zig to call C.