To the programmers

It’s too easy! Where’s the documentation for the API? I found an injection vulnerability! Global functions from ‘window’ leak! I tried to attack your server then realized nginx was ignoring me!

Keep struggling, my pretties. The game is not meant for you, but you are good guinea pigs nonetheless. Just because the game involved programming, you found yourself so, so terribly wrong about one thing: that you understood at all what was happening.

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.

It’s time for Day 4 of the Advent of Code 2020!

Now, I’ve already had a look at the problem statement, at least for part 1, and I’m not particularly excited.

But it will allow me to underline some of the points I’ve recently been *trying to make about types and correctness.

The problem is to parse passports, with fields like these:

In the wake of Why is my Rust build so slow?, developers from the mold and lld linkers reached out, wondering why using their linker didn’t make a big difference.

Of course the answer was “there’s just not that much linking to do”, and so any difference between mold and lld was within a second. GNU ld was lagging way behind, at four seconds or so.

Disclaimer:

At the time of this writing, I benefit from the fly.io “Employee Free Tier”. I don’t pay for side projects hosted there “within reasonable limits”. The project discussed here qualifies for that.

Why you might want a remote dev environment

Fearmongering aside — and Cthulhu knows there’s been a bunch, since this unfortunate tweet — there’s a bunch of reasons to want a remote dev environment.

Here’s a sentence I find myself saying several times a week:

…or we could just box it.

There’s two remarkable things about this sentence.

The first, is that the advice is very rarely heeded, and instead, whoever I just said it to disappears for two days, emerging victorious, basking in the knowledge that, YES, the compiler could inline that, if it wanted to.

Our catscii program does everything we want it to do, except that it’s a command-line application rather than a web server. Let’s fix that.

Enter axum

The documentation for the axum crate tells us how to make a basic web server, and we honestly don’t need much more than that.

So let’s add axum:

amos@miles:~/catscii$ cargo add [email protected] Updating crates.io index Adding axum =0.6 to dependencies. Features: + form + http1 + json + matched-path + original-uri + query + tokio + tower-log - __private_docs - headers - http2 - macros - multipart - w

Background

im-promp-tu (im-ˈpräm(p)-(ˌ)tü)

1. made, done, or formed on or as if on the spur of the moment: improvised

2. composed or uttered without previous preparation: extemporaneous

Merriam-Webster

On March 18th, 2025, I thought I would look into self-hosted project management solutions — something kanban-y, but.. better?

Hello and welcome to Part 11 of this series, wherein we finally use some of the code I prototyped way back when I was planning this series.

Where are we standing?

Let’s review the progress we’ve made in the first 10 parts: first, we’ve started thinking about what it takes for computers to communicate. Then, we’ve followed a rough outline of the various standards and protocols that have emerged since the 1970s.