I’ve been bragging about my website software for years! For… whew, it’s been 5 years!

I’ve been teasing folks about the cool things I did from the beginning — here’s all the articles and series I’ve written that mention it:

• 2020: A new website
• 2021: Don’t shell out!
• 2022: Updating fasterthanli.me

Has this ever happened to you?

You want to look at a JSON file in your terminal, so you pipe it into jq so you can look at it with colors and stuff.

…oh hey cool bear. No warm-up today huh.

Sure, fine, okay, I’ll read the darn man page for jq… okay it takes a “filter” and then some files. And the filter we want is.. . which, just like files, means “the current thing”:

I’d like to think that my understanding of “async Rust” has increased over the past year or so. I’m 100% onboard with the basic principle: I would like to handle thousands of concurrent tasks using a handful of threads. That sounds great!

And to become proficient with async Rust, I’ve accepted a lot of things. There are blue functions and red functions, and red (async) functions are contagious.

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.

Let’s use the Advent of Code 2022, a series of programming challenges of increasing difficulty, to learn more about the Rust programming language.

My honeymoon with the Go language is extremely over.

This article is going to have a different tone from what I’ve been posting the past year - it’s a proper rant. And I always feel bad writing those, because, inevitably, it discusses things a lot of people have been working very hard on.

In spite of that, here we are.

Having invested thousands of hours into the language, and implemented several critical (to my employer) pieces of infrastructure with it, I wish I hadn’t.

Falling out of love with warp

Back when I wrote this codebase, warp was the best / only alternative for something relatively high-level on top of hyper.

I was never super fond of warp’s model — it’s a fine crate, just not for me.

The way routing works is essentially building a type that gets larger and larger. One route might look like:

let bye = warp::path("bye") .and(warp::path::param()) .map(|name: String| format!("Good bye, {}!", name));

Hey internet! So, someone broke into some of my accounts.

I’m taking entire responsibility for this - there’s the part where I fucked up, and if I didn’t fuck up, then none of this would’ve happened.

But there’s also the part where a series of design decisions from various vendors combined into the perfect storm for me.

And we’re going to talk about both! Separately! And calmly.

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.

It’s time for the Day 14 problem!

After the hassle that was Day 13, I hope this time we’ll have a relatively chill time. And, at least for Part 1, that is true.

Our input looks something like this:

mask = XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX1XXXX0X mem[8] = 11 mem[7] = 101 mem[8] = 0

mem is our memory. Our addresses are 36-bit wide, but as you’ll see, that doesn’t matter much.