I wanted to take some time to write about a piece of software I’ve been working on lately, just so you know how I’ve been spending the last few weeks.

Rationale

A few years ago, I designed a programming language: ooc. Even though I’ve done my fair share of Java, C, Ruby, JavaScript, and even some Perl, Scala, Python, PHP, etc., I still find myself going back to ooc because it gives me access to C libs, relatively high-level constructs, and it forces me to write code that’s not too smart.

Because I started accepting donations via GitHub Sponsors, and because donating at the “Silver” tier or above gives you advance access to articles and your name in the credits, I need to interface with the GitHub API the same way I do the Patreon API.

Because I’d rather rely on third-party identity providers than provide my own sign up / log in / password forgotten / 2FA flow, user identifiers on my website are simply {provider}:{provider_specific_user_id}:

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? ln = addr? config

Hey all, thanks for checking in!

After much soul searching, I have arrived to the following conclusion:

• Teaching folks about stuff is my jam.

I’ve been writing multiple articles that sort of read like course material, if there was no dress code, maybe?

In 2013, I organized a 1st year Computer Science student project. Instead of making them implement “control tower software” for a fictional airline, I decided to go for something real - the BitTorrent protocol.

If you’re a regular, you might’ve noticed the place has changed around a little. Thing is, I’ve been spending time playing around with a radical new concept: happiness.

The year and a few months that I’ve spent working for a start-up were actually a pretty gloomy time for me, both for professional and personal reasons. It took me a while to get out of this hole and start thinking positive again.

Long story short: a couple of my articles got really popular on a bunch of sites, and someone, somewhere, went “well, let’s see how much traffic that smart-ass can handle”, and suddenly I was on the receiving end of a couple DDoS attacks.

It really doesn’t matter what the articles were about — the attack is certainly not representative of how folks on either side of any number of debates generally behave.

I sold you on some additional functionality for catscii last chapter, and we got caught up in private registry / docker shenanigans, so, now, let’s resume web development as promised.

Adding geolocation

We kinda left the locat crate stubby, it doesn’t actually do any IP to location lookups. It doesn’t even have a dependency on a crate that can do that.

This series has to end somewhere, so let’s end it here!

However, here is a list of some things I’d like to come back to:

Bundling & TypeScript

Using a bundler like Parcel so I can write some of the client-side logic in TypeScript, have it take care of building the SCSS, etc.

I do that to great effect in another project of mine and I’d like to show you how I did it!

Welcome back to the eighteenth and final part of “Making our own executable packer”.

In the last article, we had a lot of fun. We already had a “packer” executable, minipak, which joined together stage1 (a launcher), and a compressed version of whichever executable we wanted to pack.

What we added, was a whole bunch of abstractions to parse ELF headers using deku, which we used from stage1 to be able to launch the guest executable from memory, instead of writing it to a file and using execve on it.

rock 0.9.5 is out! It’s the meanest, slimmest, baddest rock release yet.

To update, run git pull && make rescue as usual. To install from scratch, clone the repo, cd into it, and run make rescue from there - it’ll download the latest bootstrap, compile itself from C, then recompile itself from ooc.

Running rock -V should print this happy little version line: