221 results for "":

Thumbnail for Doing geo-location and keeping analytics

Doing geo-location and keeping analytics

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.

Thumbnail for Printing ASCII cats to the terminal

Printing ASCII cats to the terminal

Now that our development environment is all set up, let’s make something useful!

Creating the catscii crate

From a VS Code window connected to our VM (as we just set up), let’s make a new Rust project:

amos@miles:~$ cargo new catscii Created binary (application) `catscii` package

And open it in a new VSCode window:

amos@miles:~$ code catscii

What's in the box?

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.

When rustc explodes

One could say I have a bit of an obsession with build times.

I believe having a “tight feedback loop” is extremely valuable: when I work on a large codebase, I want to be able to make small incremental changes and check very often that things are going as expected.

Especially if I’m working on a project that needs to move quickly: say, the product for an early-stage startup, or a side-project for which I only ever get to do 1-hour work bursts at most.

Thumbnail for Day 11 (Advent of Code 2022)

Day 11 (Advent of Code 2022)

It’s a new day, it’s a new advent of code puzzle.

In that one, we have to apparently cosplay as an IBM mainframe and just.. crunch them numbers. This doesn’t look fun, and I can’t think of a clever twist to make it fun, so let’s try to make it short and sweet.

Parsing

Our input looks like this:

Monkey 0: Starting items: 79, 98 Operation new = old divisible by true throw to monkey false throw to monkey items new = old + divisible by true throw to monkey false throw to monkey etc

A dynamic linker murder mystery

I write a ton of articles about rust. And in those articles, the main focus is about writing Rust code that compiles. Once it compiles, well, we’re basically in the clear! Especially if it compiles to a single executable, that’s made up entirely of Rust code.

That works great for short tutorials, or one-off explorations.

Unfortunately, “in the real world”, our code often has to share the stage with other code. And Rust is great at that. Compiling Go code to a static library, for example, is relatively finnicky. It insists on being built with GCC (and no other compiler), and linked with GNU ld (and no other linker).

Thumbnail for Building a Rust service with Nix

Building a Rust service with Nix

I often give bits and pieces of advice on how to build Rust stuff the comfy way. But it can be hard to see how everything comes together, especially when it comes to, say, deploying a web service in production.

So, let’s start from the very beginning (setting up a Linux VM), and march together towards the objective: a production-grade Rust web service, built with Nix.

Thumbnail for Deploying at the edge

Deploying at the edge

Disclaimer:

Although I no longer work for the company my website is hosted on, and this article is written in way that mentions neither my previous or current hosting provider: at the time of this writing, I don’t pay for hosting.

One thing I didn’t really announce (because I wanted to make sure it worked before I did), is that I’ve migrated my website over completely from a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to an ADN (Application Delivery Network), and that required some architectural changes.

An ooc quine

While preparing my next post about ooc documentation yet again, I stumbled upon an old ooc quine of mine. Here it is in integrality for your pleasure:

q := 34 as Char l := [ "q := 34 as Char" "l := [" "]" "for (i in 0..2) {" " l[i] println()" "}" "for (i in 0..12) {" " q print(); l[i] print(); q println()" "}" "for (i in 2..12) {" " l[i] println()" "}" ] for (i in 0..2) { l[i] println() } for (i in 0..12) { q print(); l[i] print(); q println() } for (i in 2..12) { l[i] println() }
Thumbnail for Between libcore and libstd

Between libcore and libstd

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!

Cool bear

Hurray!

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

Cool bear

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.