With the Nix project currently undergoing major turmoil , it’s good to remind ourselves that everything is transient: Every project, no matter how technically sophisticated, will eventually fade away, but its best core ideas can - and should - be identified, documented, and get to live on in other projects. So, if nix went away tomorrow, what made it “it”? Nix is a tool-assisted…
I’ve been writing a little web app in rust lately, and in it I decided to try to do it without an ORM. Instead, I modeled data access in a way that resembles the Data Access Layer pattern: You make a set of abstractions that maps the “business logic” to how the data is stored in the data store. Here are some types that I found useful in this journey so far. The IdType trait The…
Recently, tsnsrv has been getting a lot of high-quality contributions that add better support for Headscale and custom certificates, among other things. As they always do when things change, bugs crept in , and frustratingly, not in a way that existing tests could have caught: Instead of the go code (which has mildly decent test coverage), it was bugs in the nixos module! This was a great…
GitHub have enabled their “merge queue” function , which is really exciting! The “it’s not rocket science rule” of software development is a pretty good guiding principle for developing stuff in a team (if CI is fast, more on that later!) - so I’m very glad it gets easier to achieve. Unfortunately, it’s only “easier” but not “easy”.…
Like many people on the internet, I recently saw this great talk by Xe Iaso about things you can do on your Tailscale network with the tsnet package. It got me wondering what more I could do with tailscale myself. Then, three days later, I noticed that my Kobo e-reader had stopped syncing with calibre-web and I knew something about how I accessed my homelab-hosted services would have to change.…
Recently, I needed to debug a particularly nasty interaction between two programs, one of which was a go tool. To get further in understanding the issue, I had to compile a little test program with cgo , the dreaded (by go programmers) compilation mode that allows go programs to call C code. Unfortunately, it’s a bit difficult to find out what to concretely do in order to build a program…
About 8 years ago, I turned off and carted away the server running boinkmarks (aka autobench ), the benchmarking and performance tracker for SBCL . It seems like its last planet.sbcl.org entry was around 2009-04-11. At the time, it had run benchmarks on every revision 1 of SBCL since 2004 - I’d been running it for 8 years, as long as I now have not run it. Time for a retrospective! In the 8…
I recently did some minor file name munging in Rust, and was reminded that one of the hard parts about learning a new language is the differences in vocabulary. In UNIX, there are two command line tools, basename and dirname . They take a pathname as an argument and print a modified pathname to stdout, which is really handy for shell scripts. Several other languages copied that naming convention,…
Recently, I started using Anki , a spaced repetition scheduler 1 , a lot to learn French using the Fluent Forever method, and while there have been setbacks, it’s been a pretty great experience overall. It seems to be super useful for memorizing and retaining all sorts of information! Since I have to memorize all sorts of passwords (phone unlock code, laptop login password, gym locker…
I’ve been writing a bunch of rust code lately, and it’s been a pretty great experience! The thing I enjoy most about it is that the documentation looks just so extremely good . Which brings me to my major point of frustration with my rust-writing setup: Writing doc comments in emacs’s otherwise excellent rust-mode is a pain. You always have to insert the doc comment character…