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.
ktls now under the rustls org
What’s a ktls
I started work on ktls and ktls-sys, a pair of crates exposing Kernel TLS offload to Rust, about two years ago.
kTLS lets the kernel (and, in turn, any network interface that supports it) take care of encryption, framing, etc., for the entire duration of a TLS connection… as soon as you have a TLS connection.
For the handshake itself (hellos, change cipher, encrypted extensions, certificate verification, etc.), you still have to use a userland TLS implementation.
State of the fasterthanlime 2024
It’s time for some personal and professional news!
TL;DR: I started a podcast with James, I’m stable on antidepressants, I’m giving a P99 CONF about my Rust/io_uring/HTTP work, I’m trying on “they/them” as pronouns, I’m open-sourcing merde_json, rubicon and others, I got a divorce in 2023, I found a new business model.
Now that we’re on the same page: let’s unpack this a bit!
Face cams: the missing guide
I try to avoid doing “meta” / “behind the scenes” stuff, because I usually feel like it has to be “earned”. How many YouTube channels are channels about making YouTube videos? Too many.
Regardless, because I’ve had the opportunity to make my own mistakes now for a few years (I started doing the video thing in earnest in 2019), and because I’ve recently made a few leaps in quality-of-life re: shooting and editing video, I thought I’d publish a few notes, if only for reference for my future self.
Just paying Figma $15/month because nothing else fucking works
My family wasn’t poor by any stretch of the imagination, but I was raised to avoid spending money whenever possible.
I was also taught “it’s a poor craftsman that blames their tools”, which apparently means “take responsibility for your fuckups”, but, to young-me, definitely sounded more like “you don’t deserve nice things”.
I was also taught from an early age that I was born a sinner, incapable of doing good by myself, and that all the earthly things were temptations, sent by the devil to corrupt me (further I guess?) but also temporary, and that I shouldn’t attach myself.
Cracking Electron apps open
I use the draw.io desktop app to
make diagrams for my website. I run it on an actual desktop, like Windows or
macOS, but the asset pipeline that converts .drawio files, to .pdf, to
.svg, and then to .svg again (but smaller) runs on Linux.
So I have a Rust program somewhere that opens headless chromium, and loads just the HTML/JS/CSS part of draw.io I need to render my diagrams, and then use Chromium’s “print to PDF” functionality to save a PDF.
The bottom emoji breaks rust-analyzer
Some bugs are merely fun. Others are simply delicious!
Today’s pick is the latter.
Reproducing the issue, part 1
(It may be tempting to skip that section, but reproducing an issue is an important part of figuring it out, so.)
I’ve never used Emacs before, so let’s install it. I do most of my computing on an era-appropriate Ubuntu, today it’s Ubuntu 22.10, so I just need to:
Twitch fell behind
So you want to do live streams. Are you sure? Okay. Let’s talk about it.
Let’s talk numbers
Being a “content creator” (sorry for those who hate that term) is a job, for sure, and many people do it, successfully, full-time, they pay rent with it etc.
Platforms like Twitch & YouTube would have you think that, if you put in enough effort, you can grow your channel from nothing to 🎉 profitable ✨ in just a few short years.
The HTTP crash course nobody asked for
HTTP does a pretty good job staying out of everyone’s way.
If you’re reading this article, there’s a solid chance it was delivered to you over HTTP. Even if you’re reading this from an RSS reader or something. And you didn’t even have to think about it!
“Not having to think about it” is certainly a measure of success for a given technology. By contrast, I think about Bluetooth a lot. I wish I didn’t.