I had a conversation with a colleague at $COMPANY recently. We catch up every now and again to discuss Life, The Universe, and Sometimes Work Things1. He knows I’m a bit of a Rust fan-boy, so if I bring it up in conversation, he tends to be less fan-boyish and more rational in his approach to thinking about it. This is a Good Thing! We need people to make unbiased judgments on new technologies, ideally with the help of a number of years experience in other languages or domains to shape their thoughts.

For a long time, I’ve used Damon Lynch1’s excellent Rapid Photo Downloader (RPD) to manage the photos and videos that are part of the ever-expanding Grumpy Metal Photography collection. Like most people with a mobile communications device, we tend to take photos of many things when out and about2. And like most people, when we want to share the best shots of the day to friends and family (the ones that don’t use social media - hi Grumpy Metal Mum!

There’s an old saying in the building trade (a trade that I’m utterly unfamiliar with, whose work often approximates black magic to this Grumpy Metal Guy) - Measure twice, cut once. The further into my professional career I get, the more I’m convinced that this applies not just to physical tasks, but software related tasks as well. In software terms, this saying is (roughly) translated to Quantify Everything. Statistics are the best tool in our arsenal to determine how well something is performing, how efficient our people and processes are, and how to compare two things in a non-subjective sense.

When I attempted to use the sqlite crate recently, I was surprised to see the following error when I attempted to build my project: error: linking with link.exe failed: exit code: 1181 … = note: LINK : fatal error LNK1181: cannot open input file 'sqlite3.lib' Short of building sqlite3 myself, which I wasn’t overly keen on doing for what should be a small portable little util, I wasn’t too sure what to do.