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.
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);
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.