Articles
Articles are single-page pieces that give a whirlwind tour of a specific topic.
They’re different from series, which go very in-depth, taking many detours.
Open sourcing the home CMS
The promise of Rust
The part that makes Rust scary is the part that makes it unique.
And it’s also what I miss in other programming languages — let me explain!
Rust syntax starts simple.
This function prints a number:
fn show(n: i64) {
println!("n = {n}");
}
And this program calls that function — it looks like any C-family language so far, we got parentheses, we got curly brackets, we got, uhh…
That health is mental
Disclaimer:
Trigger warning: depression, talk of suicide.
It’s been a while since I wrote a mental health piece — but I think it’s important to occasionally stop, take a breather, and think about how we feel.
So.
deep breath
I’m okay, I think? Just a little restless.
A bit of personal context
For those keeping score, I went through major life events in 2023 — a divorce, a move, and the news that I might need a second round of jaw surgery.
More devops than I bargained for
Background
I recently had a bit of impromptu disaster recovery, and it gave me a hunger for more! More downtime! More kubernetes manifest! More DNS! Ahhhh!
The plan was really simple. I love dedicated Hetzner servers with all my heart but they are not very fungible.
You have to wait entire minutes for a new dedicated server to be provisioned. Sometimes you pay a setup fee, et cetera. And at some point to server static websites and serve as a K3S server, it’s simply just too big, and approximately twice the price that I should pay.
Impromptu disaster recovery
Background
im-promp-tu (
im-ˈpräm(p)-(ˌ)tü)
made, done, or formed on or as if on the spur of the moment: improvised
composed or uttered without previous preparation: extemporaneous
On March 18th, 2025, I thought I would look into self-hosted project management solutions — something kanban-y, but.. better?
This one does not spark joy.
The case for sans-io
The most popular option to decompress ZIP files from the Rust programming language is a crate simply named zip — At the time of this writing, it has 48 million downloads. It’s fully-featured, supporting various compression methods, encryption, and even supports writing zip files.
However, that’s not the crate everyone uses to read ZIP files. Some applications benefit from using asynchronous I/O, especially if they decompress archives that they download from the network.
Catching up with async Rust
In December 2023, a minor miracle happened: async fn in traits shipped.
As of Rust 1.39, we already had free-standing async functions:
pub async fn read_hosts() -> eyre::Result<Vec<u8>> {
// etc.
}
…and async functions in impl blocks:
impl HostReader {
pub async fn read_hosts(&self) -> eyre::Result<Vec<u8>> {
// etc.
}
}
Highlighted code in slides
I have obsessed about this long enough, I think it’s only fair I (and you!) get some content out of it.
When I started writing this article, I was working on my P99 CONF slides. Those slides happen to include some bits of code. And because I’m a perfectionist, I would like this code to be syntax highlighted, like this:
let addr: SocketAddr = config.address.parse()?;
let ln = TcpListener::bind(&addr).await?;
info!("🦊 {}", config.base_url);