One year as a software engineer

Post: https://joshchoo.com/writing/one-year-as-a-software-engineer
Sharing my story on how I pivoted it into tech and reflections on my first-year experience.

Lazy async operations in Rust

Post: https://joshchoo.com/writing/rust-lazy-async-operations

I learnt that Rust does not execute Futures (analogue to JavaScript Promises) until they are "awaited" (i.e. lazy behavior). On the other handle, JavaScript promises execute regardless of whether we "await" them. In my post, I explored how to simulate JavaScript's approach to Promise handling using tokio::spawn() in Rust.

Learnt AWS by developing haveibeenbreached

A simple service to search for breached accounts: https://github.com/joshchoo/haveibeenbreached

I created a clone of haveibeenpwned providing APIs to query which breaches an email number has been involved in using the following stack:

• AWS Lambda
• AWS DynamoDB
• AWS SQS
• AWS CloudFormation
• Serverless Framework
• Go

Key learning points for me include the following:

• DynamoDB Single-Table Design
• Setting IAM roles and permissions
• Provisioning AWS resources with CloudFormation
• How to configure and deploy with the Serverless Framework

Effects of thread pool size on concurrency

Post: https://joshchoo.com/writing/thread-pool-concurrency

I wrote this blog post to quantify the constraints on concurrency that a multi-threaded server with a fixed thread pool size would encounter if every Nth request experienced a fixed delay. The post explores a synthetic experiment and is primarily an exercise in quantitative reasoning.

Finished reading 99 Bottles of OOP by Sandi Metz

Follow along code examples in Rust: https://github.com/joshchoo/99-bottles

99 Bottles of OOP was one of my favorite hands-on books to strengthen my coding process. I enjoyed Sandi's style of guiding the reader through her thoughts, bringing up concerns the reader might have, discussing tradeoffs, deciding when and how to surgically refactor and create abstractions, and making value judgements.

I also took the opportunity to learn the Rust programming language by using it to follow Sandi's coding examples: https://github.com/joshchoo/99-bottles

Interestingly, I found that I internalized the book's concepts more deeply when I code along with a programming language I'm not yet familiar with. Probably because I had to slow down and think quite often.

Developed aosp-missing-blobs

A Rust command-line tool to generate a list of missing Android OS system libraries: https://github.com/joshchoo/aosp-missing-blobs/

Building Android Operating Systems can be complex and difficult 😕. Missing important system libraries can lead to runtime errors that are frustrating to debug. aosp-missing-blobs makes it easy to identify these missing system libraries by searching the existing system libraries, tracking their referenced dependencies, and presenting a list of the missing dependencies. Within a split second ⚡!