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!

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:

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!

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.

There it is. The final installment.

Over the course of this series, we’ve built a very useful Rust web service that shows us colored ASCII art cats, and we’ve packaged it with docker, and deployed it to https://fly.io.

We did all that without using nix at all, and then in the last few chapters, we’ve learned to use nix, and now it’s time to tell docker build goodbye, along with this whole-ass Dockerfile:

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.

Intro

This deals with rock internals, so fasten your seatbelts and expect many weird things along the way. I’m not necessarily proud of the state of the implementation, I’m just rolling with it and trying to improve it gradually rather than throw everything away.

An error out of nowhere

While working on my current game, John Q. Adamant, I was looking to extract a class into another module - this is routine refactoring and shouldn’t be too hard.

Earlier this week, an npm supply chain attack.

It’s turn for crates.io, the main public repository for Rust crates (packages).

The phishing e-mail looks like this:

And it leads to a GitHub login page that looks like this:

Several maintainers received it — the issue is being discussed on GitHub.

The crates.io team has acknowledged the attack and said they’d see if they can do something about it.

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.

ooc is perhaps one of my proudest achievements, but at the same time it’s one of the most annoying thorns in my side.

The main reason is that its design is flawed, and some things can’t be easily fixed at this point. Now don’t get me wrong: every design is flawed to some extent. Design, either when done by a lone coder, or by a committee, never comes out “perfect” — ignoring the fact there is no universal/objective measure of “perfectness”.