In 2020, I switched from a static site generator to something homemade.

And, as tradition commands, I did a whole write-up about it.

Since writing articles and making videos is now my full-time occupation, I took some time to upgrade futile, my server software, to the latest and greatest the Rust ecosystem has to offer.

I do not come to you with answers today, but rather some observations and a lot of questions.

The weird glitch

Recently I was editing some video and I noticed this:

Not what the finger is pointing at — the dots.

Here are the separate layers this image is made up of: the background is a stock image I’ve licensed from Envato Elements:

Because I use it as a background image, I’ve cranked down the exposition in the Color tab:

Day 9’s problem statement is convoluted - the “ah maybe that’s why I don’t usually do Advent of Code” kind of convoluted, but let’s give it a go anyway.

So, we have a series of numbers, like so:

35 20 15 25 47 40 62 55 65 95 102 117 150 182 127 219 299 277 309 576

And uh the first N numbers are a “preamble” and every number that comes after that must be the sum of any two of the numbers that come before it.

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.

You’re still here! Fantastic.

I have good news, and bad news. The good news is, we’re actually going to make an executable packer now!

Hurray!

I know right? No lie, we’re actually really going to start working on the final product from this point onwards.

What uhhh what about the previous fourteen parts?

Ah, yes, the previous fourteen parts. Well, we had fun, didn’t we? And we learned a lot about ELF, how it’s basically a database format that different tools look at in different ways, how it’s mapped in memory (more or less), what we really need to set up before starting up another executable, all that good stuff.

I started working on the itch.io desktop app over 4 years ago.

It has arguably been my main project ever since, along with companion projects like butler, capsule and many smaller libraries.

I’m fuzzy on the initial history, but I remember the codebase went through a lot of changes. As early as 2014, the whole codebase was ported from vanilla JavaScript to TypeScript. In 2016, I released a timeline of all the changes. In 2018, I released a postmortem for v25 (which I then deleted).

I still get excited about programming languages. But these days, it’s not so much because of what they let me do, but rather what they don’t let me do.

Ultimately, what you can with a programming language is seldom limited by the language itself: there’s nothing you can do in C++ that you can’t do in C, given infinite time.

As long as a language is turing-complete and compiles down to assembly, no matter the interface, it’s the same machine you’re talking to. You’re limited by… what your hardware can do, how much memory it has (and how fast it is), what kind of peripherals are plugged into it, and so on.

In the day 8 problem, our input is a height map:

30373 25512 65332 33549 35390

This is a 5x5 grid, and every number denotes the height of a tree. For part 1, we must find out how many trees are visible from the outside of the grid.

If we consider the first row, from the left: only the 3 is visible: it obscures the 0. From the right, 3 and 7 are visible.

Good morning! It is still 2020, and the world is literally on fire, so I guess we could all use a distraction.

This article continues the tradition of me getting shamelessly nerd-sniped - once by Pascal about small strings, then again by a twitch viewer about Rust enum sizes.

This time, Ana was handing out free nerdsnipes, so I got in line, and mine was:

I’ve been watching a lot of Super Mario Maker videos this past month. Probably a hundred hours! This game is like a world onto itself, and it was fascinating to learn its design language and patterns.

With Super Mario Maker 2 coming out soon, I thought I’d show off some of the cool stuff I’ve seen, to celebrate Mario Maker.

We’ll start with some basic elements of Mario Maker (with screenshots), and then move on to a lot of video clips showing cool stuff.