The meme, revisited

I just have a talk at Posit conf releasing blendtutor, a way to ended interactive coding exercises on static websites + Quarto documents. Please go try it out for yourself! The talk primarily focused on how I tried to make the tool easy to use.

I almost gave a very different talk: call it the “I rewrote it in Rust” version. That approach wasn't a great fit for the Posit conf venue. But here? No one can stop me!

Was this rewrite necessary?

Technically, no. As a human, yes. Rewriting in Rust, ironically enough, preserved my sanity. blendtutor can build lessons in R or Python. Originally I had separate R + Python packages to do that work in parallel. I realized that if I kept that approach I would end up abandoning the project. Not because it's impossible to maintain separate R + Python implementations, people do it successfully all the time!

No, I would abandon the project because there's just enough friction maintaining parity that the frustration would overtake the fun. And while I'm super excited about blendtutor, it does not and never will pay any bills. Tradeoffs hit different when the alternative is taking walks with my spouse or cuddling my cat.

But what about the technical part??

Rust is fast. Rust works well with agentic engineering. Rust is still novel for me in a fun way. But I opened with the personal because that was the core motivation for the rewrite. I wanted to build tools to help people learn on my terms. What we build is often technical but always personal. I look forward to seeing you build whatever only you could make.

A data thing I liked

dbc, a command line tool for installing ADBC drivers

A not-data thing I liked

Hope was a bonkers movie and I had a blast