Petros Amoiridis

This post is part of Series: Being a programmer again

Today was my last day at Zed Industries. I spent 5 months learning Rust and contributing to the Zed Editor.

I am grateful to Nathan, Max, and Antonio for letting me do this experiment. I am also grateful to the rest of the team for bearing with me 😅.

The original contract was for 6 months, but I decided to end it a month earlier to focus on what’s next. It was clear I wouldn’t be able to reach the experience needed to help the company within a 6 month period. We were hoping that wouldn’t be the case, but we all knew that was very likely to happen.

I came a long way since January, though. I have started understanding, writing, and—dare I say—liking Rust 😃.

I have opened 32 pull requests since January. Most were small contributions and bug fixes. Here are a few noteworthy highlights:

• Add a newline above the current line and move cursor there
• Add a terminal button to the status bar with a terminal count
• Improve context menu position consistency when it pops up
• Add a terminal icon to terminal tabs
• Introduce Reveal in Finder
• Remove contact from contract list
• Create files passed as an argument to Zed CLI if they don’t exist

That’s not much, but remember I didn’t know anything about Rust and the codebase. I also had a 12 year gap from being a full time programmer. To make things even more difficult, I left programming at a higher level. Zed needs more low level stuff because of the nature of the product.

Although I would love to continue at Zed, I have to be pragmatic and move on.

Learnings and thoughts

• Rust is difficult.
• Zed has a lot of home built code that may change often and it’s not documented.
• Home built code is Zed’s strength as it needs to be extremely fast.
• Code that changes often and is not documented doesn’t go well with newbies.
• Zed relies on pairing. It’s part of its DNA as a company.
• Knowledge transfer happens during pairing.
• Pairing is very cool for moving quickly.
• Pairing is a great way to review pull requests.
• I am in Europe. Most of the team is in the US.
• Overlapping in order to pair meant I had to wait until later in my afternoons.
• Ending often way into my evenings, with not much energy left during pairing.
• The synchronous nature of pairing is not always compatible with how I work.
• Context may get lost during pairing. Unless people write down summaries.
• Having said that, I should have paired much, much, much more.
• I consumed too many books, tutorials, and bootcamps.
• Instead, I should have written more code as a way to learn.
• Focusing on a small area of the editor might have been a better strategy.
• It might have changed the outcome, although not guaranteed.
• Rust is difficult. (duplicate on purpose)
• Once you understand Rust and its intricacies, you love it.
• Rust made me appreciate Elixir more.
• Zed Industries is the 6th company I’ve worked with in my career.
• All companies have more or less similar challenges and struggles.
• Tooling is overrated. Behavior and teamwork matters more.
• Tooling may only help if everyone is on the same page.
• You always need a simpler tool, trust me.
• You always need fewer tools.
• I don’t regret the time I have spent at Zed Industries.
• The team at Zed is very smart. Zed, the editor, has a bright future.
• The founders at Zed are very cool folks, with a great vision for the editor.
• I am leaving with the best memories, learnings, and impressions.
• I love creating again, and I can’t wait to find my niche and show what I can do.
• I am more excited than ever for the possibilities that lie ahead.

What’s next

I have started thinking about what I should focus on next. I love Elixir and I want to go back to where I left things. I also love the idea of building a game. I have to continue making a living, so, I need to figure out how that will happen. The idea of going solo attracts me, but I need to research things a bit.

Games

I want to build my first game as an indie programmer. I am going to use DragonRuby, and it’s going to be a 2D, possibly having retro influences.

I also want to build a multiplayer game using Elixir, as a proof of concept. I want to witness how it holds up as advertised of being capable of handling numerous concurrent connections without sweating.

I will continue blogging about my journey here, of course. I am also building in public on Twitter if you would like to follow me.

What are you up to Petros?

Working as a software writer during the day. Making games during the night. Streaming and vlogging. Building Calm.jobs on the far side. Check what I am doing now and talk to me.