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?

So!

I have no shortage of ongoing writing projects - I still need to edit and publish the final parts of making our own executable packer, and I’ve recently announced I was working on a Rust book/series. Those are still both on the table.

Buuut… I’m also looking at other things. My best writing happens when I’m learning about something at the same time I’m writing about it. So for example, the Rust book is a bit harder to write, because I’m mostly trying to distill knowledge I’ve already absorbed (for the most part).

The day 13 puzzle needs a speech therapist.

…because it has an awful lisp!! Ahhhahahahhhh

No but seriously we have what are ostensibly S-expressions, except they use JSON-adjacent notation:

[1,1,3,1,1] [1,1,5,1,1] [[1],[2,3,4]] [[1],4] [9] [[8,7,6]] [[4,4],4,4] [[4,4],4,4,4] [7,7,7,7] [7,7,7] [] [3] [[[]]] [[]] [1,[2,[3,[4,[5,6,7]]]],8,9] [1,[2,[3,[4,[5,6,0]]]],8,9]

Against all odds, it looks like the year 2020 will actually come to an end - in less than a day now. I know! Hard to believe for me too.

A lot of things have happened for me personally, and professionally. It’s been a big year in many ways, and I feel like, to get some closure, I need to highlight some of them.

From “looking at graphs” to “driving to the hospital”

We recently went way too in-depth into volume and loudness and all the relevant standards, like EBU R 128 — which is important to broadcast engineers, but, I’ll admit, not very entertaining to look at!

Spectrograms, on the other hand, are very fun to look at:

There’s a lot of care that goes into designing a nice spectrogram, and I want to walk you through how I made my own, assembling a couple of Rust libraries like cpal and egui.

Because I started accepting donations via GitHub Sponsors, and because donating at the “Silver” tier or above gives you advance access to articles and your name in the credits, I need to interface with the GitHub API the same way I do the Patreon API.

Because I’d rather rely on third-party identity providers than provide my own sign up / log in / password forgotten / 2FA flow, user identifiers on my website are simply {provider}:{provider_specific_user_id}:

Time for the Day 12 problem!

In this problem, we have a ship. And we have navigation instructions:

• Action N means to move north by the given value.
• Action S means to move south by the given value.
• Action E means to move east by the given value.
• Action W means to move west by the given value.
• Action L means to turn left the given number of degrees.
• Action R means to turn right the given number of degrees.

ooc makes it easy to compile your application on all major platforms (Windows, OSX, Linux) - the compiler itself runs there, and the SDK supports all these platforms with basic functionality: data structures, file handling, time handling, networking, etc.

But between getting your application running on your dev environment with all the libraries installed, and getting it into a neat package for your users to run without having to install any dependencies by hand, there’s a bag of tricks. Fortunately, I have found the time to figure most of them out. I’ll try to explain these in detail here as clearly as possible, here in this article.

I didn’t really know what to do for “World Suicide Prevention Day 2014”.

First off, I didn’t know it existed at all. Like, c’mon, know your audience, if you have a party like that, I want in!

Second, it’s a terrible name: I hereby propose “stay with us day” in place. Nevermind the “world” part because, hey, we’re on the internet, the “suicide” part because, well, avoiding that is just the very start of a long uphill battle, and let’s keep the “day” part because, honest, if we can attract people’s attention for even a single day per year, it’ll be nothing short of a miracle.