Top all-time · #6709
Nick Groenen
Personal blog · nick.groenen.me/postsprogramming
Nick Groenen writes Nick's Blog and Digital Garden, a personal blog at nick.groenen.me about programming. Since 2017, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 12 times, most often “Rust: Structuring and handling errors in 2020 (2020)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-06-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Nick Groenen's posts on Rust error handling and his four types of technical documentation framework. A post on Larry Wall's Waterbed Theory is also cited as a source.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Rust: Structuring and handling errors in 2020 (2020)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-05-15
- /posts/the-4-types-of-technical-documentation/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-06-12
What Hacker News says?
I sill don’t understand is how to write idiomatic code which deals with multiple different error types. I am not sure if it is idiomatic but I have been following the guidelines int this article for general error handling: https://nick.groenen.me/posts/rust-error-handling/ And this article for having context: https://kazlauskas.me/entries/errors.html
Comment linking /posts/rust-error-handling/
on “Rust Language Cheat Sheet”Submitted Rust: Structuring and handling errors in 2020 (2020) as a story · 147 points
HN discussion> I recommend this blog post: https://nick.groenen.me/posts/rust-error-handling/ This blog post is good indeed. The discussion on /r/rust linked at the end of the post is also worth reading. Another good and light introduction is http://www.sheshbabu.com/posts/rust-error-handling/ And a more in-depth look https://blog.burntsushi.net/rust-error-handling/
Comment linking /posts/rust-error-handling/
on “Rust Cookbook”Submitted Rust: Structuring and Handling Errors in 2020 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionDisclaimer: takes this with a grain of salt as I do use Box<dyn Error>. But I have a couple of things to note. 1. error chain is not the recommended way, despite being in the book. It needs updating! 2. The error trait in the std has come a long way since the book was originally written 3. You still might want some nicities that that Box<dun Error> doesn't provide you, and so you'd define an enum. You can do it manu…
Comment linking /posts/rust-error-handling/
on “Rust Cookbook”Submitted A look at the new plugin package coming in Go 1.8 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWhat's the relationship with Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety? < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)#Law_of_r... > There's also Larry Wall's "Waterbed Theory", effectively that complexity cannot be squashed down: it will out. Though I suspect this post-dates Tesler. < https://nick.groenen.me/people/larry-wall/ >
Comment linking /people/larry-wall/
on “Larry Tesler pioneered cut-and-paste, the one-button mouse, WYSIWYG (2005)”Submitted Rust Error Handling in 2020 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI generally agree with you when it comes to learning-focused content but there are definite cases where using an AI summary makes a lot of sense. Imagine searching for a guide on how to disassemble your laptop. Unfortunately, you can only find a 30 minute video which is full of rambling, ads or other things irrelevant to you. You can at least in theory use AI to produce a textual summary which contains only the disa…
Comment linking /posts/the-4-types-of-technical-documentation/
on “What I've Learned in the Past Year Spent Building an AI Video Editor”Submitted Structuring and Handling Errors in Rust as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWell put! If you/y’all haven’t heard, there’s a popular breakdown of “technical documentation” into four types, and this is one of the axes: https://nick.groenen.me/posts/the-4-types-of-technical-docum... People’s names for the four types vary, but I’m personally a fan of naming the axes “propositional vs procedural” and “informational vs developmental”, giving us a final four categories (00, 01, 10, 11) of “Referen…
Comment linking /posts/the-4-types-of-technical-documentation/
on “Two kinds of LLM responses: Informational vs. Instructional”Certainly writing is a skill that many programmers are not good at. However IMO an easy trap to fall into is to start documenting without a bigger understanding of the audience and the purpose of the doc. A good way to start is to identify which of the 4 types of documentation you are working on. https://nick.groenen.me/posts/the-4-types-of-technical-docum... Personally I find it very easy to put too much explanatio…
Comment linking /posts/the-4-types-of-technical-documentation/
on “The Surprising Power of Documentation”
