When I launched my Patreon, I vowed to explain how computers work. But in 2019, computers rarely work in isolation. So let’s take the time to write a few articles about how computers talk to each other.

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.

And of course, as always, there are reasons why things are the way they are. In an effort to understand those reasons, I opened a GitHub issue which resulted in a short but productive discussion.

I walked away discouraged, and then decided to, reasons be damned, attack this problem from three different angles.

In the previous article, I gave brummi a go. However, we’ve seen that it still doesn’t fit our requirements: we need a tool that’s fast, easy to install and configure, produces beautiful and usable docs.

Yesterday I started building my own documentation generator, and in this series I’ll present the challenges I face and how I solved them. This might show a few ooc tricks, perhaps some software design, some good, some bad, but overall I hope it’ll be a good read!

What’s infuriating when letting others play an early prototype is that you hear constantly the same things. Some bugs are non-trivial to fix, some you’re just not motivated to fix now… sometimes you just have your head elsewhere, gotta focus, or are elbow-deep in some other piece of code and the damn walls can wait.

The day 7 challenge talks about trees! File trees that is.

The temptation to solve it before starting to write this article so I don’t look silly is high, but I’m explicitly not doing so, so that we can bang our collective heads against any walls at the same time, and see how we can get out of it! Trees are serious business!

The sample input looks like this:

With the previous part’s VM still running, let’s try connecting to our machine over SSH.

Normally, to connect to a machine, you’d find its IP address. On Linux, a decade ago, you would’ve used ifconfig. Nowadays you can use ip addr:

The loopback interface (lo) is local, so it’s not useful to reach the box from the outside: you can see it can be accessed over IPv4 at address 127.0.0.1 but not just! What we’re reading here is 127.0.0.1/8, which corresponds to the range 127.0.0.1 - 127.255.255.255

Another day, another Advent of Code 2020 problem.

That one seems fun! For some nerdy values of fun.

Our input is a set of rules:

Day, 10! Day, 10!

Okay, Day 10.

Again, the problem statement is very confusing - but what it all boils down to is this. We have a list of numbers:

To which we need to add 0 and whatever the maximum was, plus three:

From there on, if we take them in order, we’ll have gaps of 1 and gaps of 3: