In the Day 13 problem, we’re trying to take the bus.

Our input looks like this:

939 7,13,x,x,59,x,31,19

The first line indicates the earliest minute we can leave from the bus terminal, and the second line indicates the “identifier” of the buses that are active.

Each bus departs every “bus ID” minutes - bus 7 leaves at minute 0, minute 7, minute 14, minute 21, etc. The question is: which bus can we take first (apparently they either all go to the same destination, or we don’t really care where we’re going), and how long do we have to wait for it?

Hello and welcome to Part 11 of this series, wherein we finally use some of the code I prototyped way back when I was planning this series.

Where are we standing?

Let’s review the progress we’ve made in the first 10 parts: first, we’ve started thinking about what it takes for computers to communicate. Then, we’ve followed a rough outline of the various standards and protocols that have emerged since the 1970s.

During a recent Rust Q&A Session on my twitch channel, someone asked a question that seemed simple: why are small string types, like SmartString or SmolStr, the same size as String, but small vec types, like SmallVec, are larger than Vec?

Now I know I just used the adjective simple, but the truth of the matter is: to understand the question, we’re going to need a little bit of background.

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.

Let’s use the Advent of Code 2020, a series of programming challenges of increasing difficulty, to learn more about the Rust programming language.

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

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.

In the previous article, We’ve built a nagaqueen-based tool that can parse one ooc file, detect class declarations and print its doc strings. Today, we’re making a bit of infrastructure for our app to support more sizable projects.

Source path and lib folders

Parsing a single file was a nice milestone, but it’s not nearly enough. We want to generate documentation for a whole project at a time: and since we’ll want to cross-link the various bits of documentation we generate, we’ll also need to parse the various dependencies (such as the ooc sdk, and any used library) so that we can resolve argument types and link them properly.

So! Rust futures! Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Until it’s not. So let’s do the easy thing, and then instead of waiting for the hard thing to sneak up on us, we’ll go for it intentionally.

Cool Bear's hot tip

That’s all-around solid life advice.

Choo choo here comes the easy part 🚂💨

We make a new project:

$ cargo new waytoodeep Created binary (application) `waytoodeep` package

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?