221 results for "":
2025 Recap: so many projects
I’ve been working on so many projects in 2025, I thought it was important for me to make a recap, if only just to clear my head.
There are many, many, many things to go through and we don’t have a sponsor today, so I’m gonna start right away with facet!
facet
facet is a project that I started working on in March of this year — that’s right, it’s only been ten months, yet it feels like an eternity.
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.
Windows dynamic libraries, calling conventions, and transmute
So, how does ping.exe actually send a ping? It seems unrealistic that
ping.exe itself implements all the protocols involved in sending a ping.
So it must be calling some sort of library. Also, since it ends up
talking to the outside world via a NIC (network interface controller),
the kernel is probably involved at some point.
In reading files the hard way - part 2, we learned about dynamic libraries (like libc), and the Linux kernel, and how syscalls allowed us to ask the Linux kernel to do our bidding. For this series, we’re going to have to look at the Windows equivalents.
Efficient game updates
A little while ago, I wrote an article on things that can go wrong when downloading, it listed a series of reasons, from network problems to invalid content to imperfect hardware that may occur when initially installing a game.
This article discusses what methods we can use to upgrade a game to a later version, when an older version has been successfully installed.
Cleaning up and upgrading third-party crates
The bleeding edge of rustc and clippy
Typically, you’d want a production application to use a stable version of Rust. At the time of this writing, that’s Rust 1.65.0, which stabilizes a bunch of long-awaited features (GATs, let-else, MIR inlining, split debug info, etc.).
For every Rust release, Mara makes a wonderful recap thread on Twitter, on top of the official announcement.
Day 7 (Advent of Code 2020)
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:
light red bags contain 1 bright white bag, 2 muted yellow bags.
dark orange bags contain 3 bright white bags, 4 muted yellow bags.
bright white bags contain 1 shiny gold bag.
muted yellow bags contain 2 shiny gold bags, 9 faded blue bags.
shiny gold bags contain 1 dark olive bag, 2 vibrant plum bags.
dark olive bags contain 3 faded blue bags, 4 dotted black bags.
vibrant plum bags contain 5 faded blue bags, 6 dotted black bags.
faded blue bags contain no other bags.
dotted black bags contain no other bags.
Surviving Rust async interfaces
I used to be afraid of async Rust. It’s easy to get into trouble!
But thanks to the work done by the whole community, async Rust is getting easier to use every week. One project I think is doing particularly great work in this area is async-std.
Let’s say we want to compute the SHA3-256 hash of a file. It’s very easy to do with synchronous I/O:
Experiments in happiness
If you’re a regular, you might’ve noticed the place has changed around a little. Thing is, I’ve been spending time playing around with a radical new concept: happiness.
The year and a few months that I’ve spent working for a start-up were actually a pretty gloomy time for me, both for professional and personal reasons. It took me a while to get out of this hole and start thinking positive again.
Huffman 101
Let’s play a game: your objective is to guess a word, but you can only ask yes or no questions. You should also aim to ask as few questions as possible.
You might have played a variant of this game before, guessing famous actors or musicians. You’d usually ask questions like “Are they alive?”, or “Have they won an Oscar”? And that would allow you to narrow down the possibilities, until you finally resort to a list of direct guesses (“Is it Amy Adams?”) or simply give up.
sam 0.2.0 released
Today I decided to release sam 0.2.0. There are only a handful of new features in there but it’s still releaseworthy! See the previous sam announcement for more information on the tool itself.
Source path and lib folders
Let’s take a look at what sam tells us when launching it.
sam version 0.2.0
Usage: sam [update|get|status|promote]
Commands
* update: update sam's grimoir of formulas
* get [USEFILE]: clone and/or pull all dependencies
* status [USEFILE]: display short git status of all dependencies
* promote [USEFILE]: replace read-only github url with a read-write one for given use file
* clone [--no-deps] [REPONAME]: clone a repository by its formula name
Note: All USEFILE arguments are optional. By default, the
first .use file of the current directory is used
Copyleft 2013 Amos Wenger aka @nddrylliog