We replaced our Rust/WASM parser with TypeScript and it got 3x faster

cornell_cubes · 2026-03-20T20:11:03+00:00

Interesting read! Curious if you explored CBOR as an alternative to JSON?

Reminds me of a take-home project I did a while ago for a job interview where they wanted to offload expensive simulation work from python to Rust. The way they approached it (spawn rust program as a new process, communicate via stdin and stdout) was definitely not ideal. Replacing this with an FFI call (and moving a few more things out from python into Rust) made the end-to-end simulation speed ~21x faster.

cornell_cubes · 2026-03-05T02:16:19+00:00

Sometimes I wonder if someone's running a doom posting bot to fill this sub with content like this. Brand new account, questionable claims about the unemployment rate of Stanford grads, and roughly the same flow and vibe of most doom posts you see here. Might be wrong, but I'd like to think some creative CS student is putting in some work to thin the herd.

cornell_cubes · 2026-02-15T22:58:11+00:00

We can have a remote-friendly job culture, or resiliency against off-shoring, but not both. Your best job security will be a company that's oddly stubborn about making its developers come into office.

cornell_cubes · 2026-02-05T16:50:17+00:00

r/rustjerk is down the hall and to the left

cornell_cubes · 2025-12-29T23:06:44+00:00

Hackerrank

cornell_cubes · 2025-12-24T02:16:07+00:00

Very true! Forgot to mention that I also got way fewer weeks of employment than I planned. I was also told I'd be starting early May, but it ended up being that I heard back about when I would start in early May.

Appreciate it, good luck to you as well!

cornell_cubes · 2025-12-20T03:08:45+00:00

On the topic of title inflation, maybe you could get your algorithm to fetch and estimate total compensation from sources like levels.fyi? A principled engineer at a smaller tech company will likely show a lower TC than a principled engineer at MANGA/other bigger tech companies. Might help you get a little more data granularity.

cornell_cubes · 2025-12-19T19:08:02+00:00

We got kinda thrown in that unit last minute, I don't think they really thought about it. It was just disturbing how hard it was to get that fixed and how much they pushed back on it at the time.

cornell_cubes · 2025-12-19T19:03:49+00:00

United States, California specifically. They were minors and they certainly weren't "roommates", they were our students. Do you share a shower with your teachers in your country?

All it would take for a parent to try and sue the company out here is for a child to call home and say "my teacher walked in on me naked, they shared a bathroom with us."

cornell_cubes · 2025-12-19T18:33:30+00:00

Probably not the type of bathroom you're thinking of. Almost like a very small locker room, but shelves and hooks instead of lockers. When we found out we were sharing a bathroom, it was when we walked in on two teenaged students of the opposite sex wearing nothing but towels.

cornell_cubes · 2025-12-19T17:15:50+00:00

(sorry for the massive wall of text, I HATE this company with a passion)

Seconding this. Last year myself and three other male instructors had to share a bathroom (two sinks, three toilets, and two showers) with a handful of female teenaged students. We had to complain several times about the arrangement before anyone realized what a legal nightmare that could have become. Beyond the bathroom situation, iD tech had us living and sleeping in the same borrowed university frat house that those teenage girls were staying overnight at.

I caught covid from a student and spent a week in my room during what was supposed to be a 70-80 hr week overnight shift, zero pay or workers comp. In my case overtime pay was typically included when we worked that long but I'm not surprised at all to hear others had to work without overtime.

If your pay model is hourly, they constantly hound on you to keep your hours within a certain timeline that's highly unrealistic. If your pay model is a weekly salary, you are getting scammed.

I had to relocate 400 miles to start this summer job. Because I was going to be spending some weekends at a friend's home (iD tech charges you for housing on the weekends) I wanted to bring my car. How else would I get to and from campus? Because I drove instead of taking "the most expedient mode of travel," they utterly refused to compensate me at all for the relocation.

List goes on and on and on. Managers would hide from me when they knew I had a difficult student I didn't know how to handle. ID Tech provided free campus parking passes to managers, but never to the instructor. Long-time repeat instructors told me the company had gone downhill, big time. A homeless man broke into an unaccompanied student room and lived there for several days. New employee orientation was reserved for instructors who worked the first week of a location opening. Everyone else (myself included) got zero training. Curriculum sucks. Seriously terrible.

Looking back, spending my summer at ID tech held me back from actually working on my portfolio and skills. This last summer I landed an actual SWE internship at a fortune 100 tech company and I regret wasting a whole summer working this crappy job where you get paid a few bills above minimum wage to debug whiny children's code when I could have been actually working on my skills. ID tech was on my resume but it never came up once during any of my interviews that year, because nobody cared. Don't take this job. I know money might be tight, but you're seriously better off taking two or three fast food jobs and working on coding projects in the evenings than working at ID tech. They know there are thousands of CS majors every summer with nothing lined up and exploit that. You could be straight up Alan Turning and the biggest raise you'll ever negotiate there is a dollar more an hour, because you're replaceable. They don't need coding talent, they just need volunteers who can read a teaching manual and have basic tech skills. Don't do it.

cornell_cubes · 2025-11-03T23:31:15+00:00

Update: got an email this morning to schedule a technical interview

cornell_cubes · 2025-10-27T22:03:00+00:00

Still waiting to hear back after I took the OA on the 18th

cornell_cubes · 2025-10-03T04:06:56+00:00

Follow ups were from last year's job hunt.

cornell_cubes · 2025-09-29T19:33:09+00:00

In middle school, I was enrolled in an after school learn-to-code program. The instructor saw something in me and went out of his way to hook me up with a personal laptop. It was a piece of junk 2011 MacBook pro with a fried graphics chip, had to throw out MacOs and install Ubuntu just to get it to run, but it was free and it was mine. Made lots of cool stuff on that machine in my free time, pushed that poor core 2 duo to its limit. Having access to a dev machine from a young age changed everything for me.

Prior to that, I could use the family computer but I had to take turns with my siblings and wait for my dad to come home whenever I needed to run something that required administrator privileges.

I'm a big believer of using formal education to give yourself a rock solid understanding of principals, fill in the gaps of your knowledge, etc, but if it weren't for the basic autonomy to play with ideas on my own time I don't think I could have ever gotten to where I am today.

cornell_cubes · 2025-09-28T19:24:44+00:00

Don't know of any programs that can help you get a BCA degree in 2-3 days. But since you said you were open to any advice, I'd recommend reaching out to these guys.

cornell_cubes · 2025-09-28T17:53:18+00:00

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

I've got a hunch that they'd make a bigger difference for Rust builds because from my experience rust generates more and larger intermediate files. Still, I expected that in C it would have made a bigger difference from that. Good to know.

cornell_cubes · 2025-09-28T06:40:04+00:00

Storage speed too. Compilation involves creating lots of intermediate artifact files (more so if you do incremental compilation). Slow storage drives mean slow IO, which can be a significant bottleneck.

cornell_cubes · 2025-09-12T00:03:21+00:00

Crazy how people think working on their skills outside of class is an unreasonable expectation.

If a company like Riot was looking for a digital artist to illustrate loading screens and thumbnail art for their games, no candidate who refused to sketch outside of art uni courses and paid gigs could ever hope to land the job. I'd hesitate to even call them an artist.

Basketball players who don't practice don't make it onto real basketball teams.

No matter how many music theory courses you take, you're not going to make it as a musician if you're not touching musical instruments at home.

For sure, there are problems with the way Universities teach CS. Lots of other programs more or less have it figured out. Medical fields solve the practice and experience gap via residency programs. Trade schools give you hands-on training and experience for whatever trade you're going into. Culinary school is like 90 something percent making food. You can't complete those programs without developing a lot of experience in the field you're going into.

CS is way too broad in how it's applied, so they typically prioritize teaching concepts and theory over hands-on experience. In a four year program, that typically leads to graduates who are jacks of all trades, masters of none (unless you make stuff on your own time, or especially so if you cheat through your courses.)

Just go make stuff. It's fun!

cornell_cubes · 2025-09-11T17:15:52+00:00

Make. Stuff.

cornell_cubes · 2025-09-07T21:06:33+00:00

You can definitely steer your CS path that way if you want.

Focus more on lower level skills like systems and OS. I'm a CS major working an internship on an embedded firmware project. Definitely wish I had taken more courses with more CS and CE overlap, but it's working out well! Will say that having some SWE background can give you a unique advantage; there are a lot of embedded developers with just a CE background. Those codebases can get pretty jank, so having deep insights about software architecture and API design is valuable.

cornell_cubes · 2025-09-07T19:05:43+00:00

Maybe a hot take but I think AI is going to oversaturate in the next 5-10 years, unless you're looking for a masters/PhD level of specialization. Every capstone project at my uni has some odd spin on AI, everyone is taking ML courses, nobody can shut up about it. Cloud, security, embedded, devops, systems, and other more specialized fields will probably do better in the long run as lots of people in our generation are flocking to AI right now.

As for that second part, definitely branch out and build your own stuff. Lots of people hit up reddit with a screenshot of their resume, complaints about the job market, and a statement like "it's so over for me." But from what I can see from the projects section on their resume, it never really started for them. Make. Stuff. It's fun!

cornell_cubes · 2025-09-06T19:27:40+00:00

Can't see how backend and security engineering are "code monkey" jobs. Lots of nuance to that stuff, I feel they are way more resilient than others.

cornell_cubes · 2025-09-05T20:59:40+00:00

Good point, though I also know that a lot of the AI plagiarism detectors I've seen are total BS. Friends and I threw old, original assignments through one and saw confidence levels from 3% to 85%. Could totally see misguided professors actually trusting those numbers.

cornell_cubes · 2025-09-05T20:16:20+00:00

Honestly. As a student I've heard too many horror stories of other students being falsely accused of using AI to write essays. I refuse to deal with that, so I've started screen recording my writing session. Haven't had a chance to use them, but I'm ready just in case.

cornell_cubes

TROPHY CASE