seanmonstar - Micro

Rust Errors generally shouldn't be PartialEq

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Errors might have internal details that don’t make sense to compare. Like positional data, or a source chain. Even if you don’t have those details yet, committing to a public API of PartialEq can restrict you from internal refactoring.

The common reason to want this is for testing purposes. People want to assert an error case matches what they expect. But that doesn’t need equality. matches! , kind(), or is_*() patterns fit better.

A public, exhaustive, flat enum could choose differently. But those look more like a kind(). If you have private error details, I don’t think they make sense for comparing.

Some interesting discussion a few years ago.

Owning my microblog with POSSE

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

POSSE is the practice of publishing on your own site first, and pushing that out to other services. To get the content where people are, while linking back to the original owned post.

I now have a /micro blog on my own website, and automation (a GH action) to break up new posts and send them to Mastodon and Bluesky as threads. It even has it’s own rss feed.

This new setup lets me nudge people more towards my own property. As various other properties come and go, my online identity and content lasts longer.

And it solves one of my longer-standing concerns about microblogging: it feels like they can be more important content now, because they’re mine.