In 2020, I switched from a static site generator to something homemade.

And, as tradition commands, I did a whole write-up about it.

Since writing articles and making videos is now my full-time occupation, I took some time to upgrade futile, my server software, to the latest and greatest the Rust ecosystem has to offer.

HTTP does a pretty good job staying out of everyone's way.

If you're reading this article, there's a solid chance it was delivered to you over HTTP. Even if you're reading this from an RSS reader or something. And you didn't even have to think about it!

"Not having to think about it" is certainly a measure of success for a given technology. By contrast, . I wish I didn't.

I don't mean to complain. Doing software engineering for a living is a situation of extreme privilege. But there's something to be said about how alienating it can be at times.

Once, just once, I want to be able to answer someone's "what are you working on?" question with "see that house? it wasn't there last year. I built that".

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.

Fearmongering aside — and Cthulhu knows there's been a bunch, since — there's a bunch of reasons to want a remote dev environment.

It happened when I least expected it.

Someone, somewhere (above me, presumably) made a decision. "From now on", they declared, "all our new stuff must be written in Rust".

I'm not sure where they got that idea from. Maybe they've been reading propaganda. Maybe they fell prey to some confident asshole, and convinced themselves that Rust was answer to their problems.

Long story short: a couple of my articles got really popular on a bunch of sites, and someone, somewhere, went "well, let's see how much traffic that smart-ass can handle", and suddenly I was on the receiving end of a couple DDoS attacks.

It really doesn't matter what the articles were about — the attack is certainly not representative of how folks on either side of any number of debates generally behave.

Up until recently, hyper was my favorite Rust HTTP framework. It's low-level, but that gives you a lot of control over what happens.

Here's what a sample hyper application would look like:

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

$ cd nostalgia
$ cargo add hyper@0.14 --features "http1 tcp server"
    Updating 'https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index' index
      Adding hyper v0.14 to dependencies with features: ["http1", "tcp", "server"]
$ cargo add tokio@1 --features "full"
    Updating 'https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index' index
      Adding tokio v1 to dependencies with features: ["full"]