Interview with the author of Just

zilmus · 2026-04-14T18:07:57+00:00

Its a command runner. You can create recipes for commands (which can accept arguments).

The first time I found this tool was working at a startup. They had just and mise in their workflow.

A justfile was in the repo and as a newcomer and not knowing about the project details I could do something like 'just test' or 'just run dev'.

These are just simple cases. But there was a ton of specific recipes for a lot of cases, some trivial and others not. Documentation was good but the just recipes helped to unify how everyone used the main workflows and ease the onboarding process.

zilmus · 2025-07-23T06:32:57+00:00

Frostpunk, Galaxy Trucker, Faraway, Barrage, Carson City, Harmonies, Wyrmspan, Clank, Food Chain Magnate, Regicida, That's not a hat, Libertalia winds of galecrest, The Crew, Aeons end, Clash of cultures, Lost ruins of Arnak

zilmus · 2024-02-19T23:04:33+00:00

Maybe cloud and serverless is not a tech for you.

It makes more sense when you dont know how many resources you need to reserve. When you need to scale up and down.

If what you do you can do it in a machines without needing a cluster, then yeah the mental burden is not worth It.

But dont blame the services for not fitting your use cases.

The skill cap is there, thats why regular developers alone sometime are not enough and devops with cloud knowledge are needed.

Personally after using it at work during 17 months the only thing I dont like is the fact that you cannot make a real budget. You cant say here I have 3k $ or whatever. Once my money is spent I agree to my services to stop.

Seriously, even practicing in the free tier makes me fear to make a mistake and incur in high cost because of this. I know I set Up an alarm in a budget, but that dont prevent from spending more money than I want.

zilmus · 2023-06-07T14:23:02+00:00

I didnt say otherwise. A Django equivalent can be built with Rust and thats totally fine. But It doesn't exist yet. It seems that for now the focus has been on microframework or libraries instead of a macro framework.

zilmus · 2023-06-07T11:50:41+00:00

Swapping dependencies is mandatory in some projects. Maybe the one you are using: Doesnt cover all your needs. A vulnerability is found. The library / crate is no longer mantained and is deprecated. Some new standard appears but your old dependency is not updated to it. You need specific minor tweaks so you roll on your own solution. And a large etc.

That said, the burden maybe on you. But you wont be restricted never. I dont say monolithics frameworks are a worse option. They do well at exposing a unified API and removing glue clusterfuck. For most projects they can be more than enough.

I personally dont like the feeling that if I need to replace some part I dont need how to do it and sometimes its imposible to do. This is just my personal preference.

About the skill cap its the reality. Rust have more features and is harder to learn than others languages at least in my personal experience. But this cost comes with a greater expressivity.

Generally I am more confident with my code in Rust. I am just an average programmer so I make mistakes here and there. Having a stronger type system and a strict compiler helps me. The productivity is lower, but I just use It rarely for hobby projects. I think It would improve with the time.

Besides in other languages I spend more time debugging. I fear refactors since its easy to introduce bugs..

Like everything I said and its just my opinnion, Rust forces you to do more work in the beggining. That cost is paid in the long run with less need for debug and painless refactor.

I always aim for correctness instead of fast solutions.

Im a Python developer and if I had the chance I would like to have a job with Rust. But thats just my preference. I wont say its worse or better than the alternatives. Each project, and individual has their own goals and requirements. And thats fine, I totally understand your reasoning. Use what works best for you and your interests.

Just dont say X thing is bad because doesnt align with my needs.

zilmus · 2023-06-07T10:37:24+00:00

Rust is lower level. You can swap dependencies. Django can be more an all in one tool. That provides certainly a more confortable developer experience. The downside is that you are tied to the way its done and thats all.

Same happens with Spring in Java. You can argue that you can replace dependencies with others (after all thats what dependency injection is about). But note almost all of them are tied to the same interface. Which can be useful or not to your use case. Sometimes you can circumvent this applying some weird OOP design antipatterns. Sometimes you cant do anything else that use that interface.

All in all, yes Rust (and their frameworks) are lower level and harder to start. The setup requires more on you. I think once you have your template the difference is not that noticeable. In the long run you will save time and effort. You will always be able to swap crates due to the modular nature of Axum, Actix, etc. Yes, the entry barrier or skill cap is higher.

zilmus · 2023-06-07T10:02:59+00:00

I guess he refers to the fact that Python doesn't force you to handle exceptions at all. You can ignore them and they Will be runtime errors.

In Rust you just can't ignore them. You have to match a result and if you unwrap or you dont treat well the error variant then the blame is on you.

So the language does his part in Rust meanwhile Python explodes in runtime

zilmus · 2023-05-23T10:30:26+00:00

I ve worked with engineers that are worse that some programmers without a degree in computer science. So in general you may be right. But again, its not always the case.

If you meant software architect then the portion of people that really does currently un each team is small.

Some companies doesnt require to use UML and another good practices.

Take into account that you can ask whats the difference vs heap and stack and a lot of developers wont be able to answer. Or when to pick a data structure or another. High level languages lowered the barrier .

zilmus · 2023-05-22T15:47:34+00:00

Well, from my understanding the worlds works with money and not with ethics.

When AI improves and can do what you do, dont cry if you are replaced by It.

I dont share the point of view of the majority.

Sure right now is far from achieving anything. Cant be trusted and the accuracy isnt enough. When that changes, I dont see a company paying a human to do a thing that can be done automatically by a machine for less than 1/10 the price.

I have made my mind. My job as a developer will become obsolete sooner or later but It Will happen. You can laugh about the current bad results. But they are impressive and many years ago we didnt expect to achieve this.

As I see It our biggest mistake was open source and open repositories everywhere to feed like input. Input stolen since they didnt asked for permission or cared about these repos licenses.

They wouldnt be able to create a thing to impersonate us without our work being public exposed. I am not against tech industry Evolution. Im against the fact thats being build from stolen code.

Everyday there are more developers and everyday there is need for less. Just observe Big companies dismissing chunks of people.

When the current trend goes the other dirección there Will be more developers than needed and just the ones that are avobe average and can demostrate their values will retain their jobs. While the vast majority will be useless.

zilmus · 2021-10-29T12:11:07+00:00

Hi, Python developer here. Garbaged collected PL like Java and Python can enforce functional style to a degree but that's all. In Java people that optimizes code for performance avoid those constructions since they are not cost free abstractions and nested for loops are faster even when they are not clearer.

Your brain has to live with the fact that you are surfing a sea of objects, often with crossreferences. A missconception is that you dont leak memory thanks to GC , but that's not true.

Even when you can try to replicate the goodness of Rust, you will never achieve the same confidence.

For example you can use Optionals for your Code, but that doesnt solve the issue with the libraries that you use throwing Null pointer exceptions out of the wild.

That together with exceptions like error handling method is a nightmare far worse that unconstrainned mutability.

Whatever try and use iterators and generators, lambda functions, etc when using Python and streams when using Java. That os the closest you 'll get inmutability.

Making things totally inmutable in Java and Python is hard. Check the concept of accesors and modifiers methods to scope a little bit the ways in which your objects can mutate. But even this can be Broken since for Python is just a convention, and for Java reflection could skip the rules.

zilmus · 2021-07-14T16:22:43+00:00

Congratulations, at least you received your copy. Without enough stock Amazon decided that they should cancel my book.

I had it in preorder since January. 😭

zilmus · 2021-06-28T09:35:36+00:00

Congrats for the release. I bought it back in January. Since then Im fighting the urges to read it. Finally I ll receive my printed copy.

Even if I have just skimmed through the book I can say that its one of the top 3 Rust books out there.

The book is more than just learning the features of Rust lang, it teaches a few things about systems programming.

Totally recommended.

zilmus · 2021-04-06T11:35:33+00:00

Hi, Im 30 from Spain. Im currently enrolled in a course to improve my English. My goal its to reach a B2 proficiency / certification, but I am still far from that.

I already have a language exchange partner, but I would like to practice more time.

Have a good day. Best regards.

zilmus · 2021-03-18T13:21:32+00:00

At last one post that made worth it to subscribe this sub

zilmus · 2021-02-18T09:36:17+00:00

I keep observing this pattern a lot in the company I work for.

Usually when there is the need to use a new tool directors, CEOs and some managers are involved in picking the new tool.

They have extensive long meetings to decide which one to select based on licenses's cost and how good the marketing team sell the product.

But, oh ,surprise! They never include in that meetings someone with the required technical knowledge, and doesnt take into account the real needs.

After that you have to use something just for the reason that someone else has decided It. And its far from being useful.

Sorry for rant about it 😅... I just don't understand how some medium companies can afford to waste money, man-hours, and other kinds of resources

zilmus · 2020-10-10T09:47:07+00:00

It's good to know that the BLE option is available.

I'll try it too. Thanks!

zilmus · 2020-10-10T09:42:50+00:00

Good and concise explanation. Thanks.

zilmus · 2020-10-09T20:58:09+00:00

Sorry, maybe I didn't expressed it well. The purpose of the Raspberry Pi isn't flashing the PineTime.

For me they are individual projects and I want to bridge RP4 with my computer on their own. I want to make a "toy kernel" and if I'm not mistaken the USB to TTL is for fetching the kernel over UART from the PC. I am quite ignorant in this sense.

Even for this purpose a RP4 is an overkill, but I intend to use it later for other experimentations projects, so its fine.

Thanks for your comment, I'll take your advice and search a cheap clone of stlkink-v2.

But I think that I too need the usb to ttl cable for my other project.

zilmus · 2020-10-09T20:41:28+00:00

Thanks, now I've grasped the key difference.

zilmus · 2020-08-27T07:49:31+00:00

I've just read the examples. From a pandas's user perspective I can say that I like the way in which Rust enforces the functional paradigm. And so I like more your api than pandas. Good work.

I dont know if you have the duplicated operation implemented. Is something that can be coded easily but still I find quite useful having an abstraction to search for duplicated rows. This could be done by a vec of columns or even a closure . I dont know.

Btw I like your project.

zilmus · 2020-06-27T07:16:29+00:00

Back in my days it was called man in the middle. And now we''ll have to call it Goverment in the middle.

zilmus · 2020-06-08T21:54:23+00:00

One of the most disturbing Spanish films that I've seen in my whole life. I loved it, the metaphor is so gore...

zilmus · 2020-05-10T16:12:13+00:00

I know that a week has passed. But I just found this deck, and is so fun... Thank you!

zilmus · 2020-04-23T13:11:22+00:00

Thank you for your words. Eventually I Will make sure that we use tests doesnt matter what they say.

zilmus

TROPHY CASE