Rust is a relatively new programming language (first alpha released in 2012) which recently caught my attention. Although I'm mostly a Python hacker and Web developer, I still do lower level coding from time to time, including some open source work in C++. Besides, I enjoy the elegance of Haskell; the functional approach to solving problems is quite enlightening. Where does Rust fit into that? The language is still a work-in-progress territory (as of this post the current version is 0.10), but there are already many interesting features. Memory safety, strong typing (with type inference), pattern matching and a slick concurrency model are just a few of those. Let's jump in!

A week ago I gave a talk at PyWaw about astronomy, exoplanets and accessing Kepler data with Python. Here are the slides:

The video recording can be found below.

Yesterday I've released pygcvs 0.1.3 which fixes a small bug with parsing star coordinaates. The bug appeared when the coordinate part of GCVS entry was a string containing only spaces (for example when the star exists under an alternative designation). There are about 150 such stars in GCVS, for example VY Cep, which is actually another name for RR Cep. Starting from pygvs 0.1.3, such empty coordinates are correctly parsed as a pair of None values.

Web 2.0, AJAX, HTML5, and now Big Data. Buzzwords, buzzwords everywhere. However, Big Data means data, and these large amounts of data need to be stored somewhere. Apache HBase is a distributed data store well suited for the task. As I've been playing around with Vagrant and Ansible recently, I've created a virtual machine environment for quick-and-dirty HBase setup. See vagrant-hbase at my GitHub.

This year's DjangoCon Europe took place in Warsaw, Poland. It was the best programming conference I've ever attended. Why? Read on.