Welcome to the Blog

hi guys consider subscribing to my yt channel pls thx

Welcome to the first "blog" post I've created. It's not the usual kind of blog that has an RSS feed (yet) and has no direct focus but I plan on occasionally venting thoughts or breakdown technical details of things I think are cool. While this could totally devolve into ramblings about why Rust is a great language or other insane things like Windows being a pretty ok developer platform, it's too early to make a judgment on where this will go.

Again, I'm writing on my own time and with my own passion, so I don't know where this will go. If this gets really popular, I'll consider adding ways to support me as a way to incentivize continuing this work. Who knows. The future is uncertain.

Aside from this welcome, the inaugural blog post will be based on some design journals I wrote for a project while in College making a Java linter (which is open source but I would not recommend using it compared to established tools!). It's something I think shows a lot of how I think and reason about things and has some interesting surface-level insights about program analysis. Should you read it? I'd like you to but it's your choice.

Why the name "ref_cycle"

Reference cycles are a "construct" (for lack of a better term) where pointers/objects in memory are self-referential in a consistent chain. Rust has an entire thing about using reference cycles and how it could leak memory, and recursive data structures will often use them by design.

I often find that whenever I work on anything (personal, professional, or sh*ts and giggles), I always do a ton of research. I'm the kind of person who will have 200 Chrome tabs open and will cast wide nets during research; A good number of times it narrows down into a concrete set of sources/information, some of which I already had open. This constant "cycle" of gathering and refining "references" to information I use is also how I organize my thoughts in my mess of a head.

So not just a programming pun, it does have some relevant meaning to me. At least it's better than just calling it "Face's Blog".

This post of the ref_cycling blog is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0