With the Nix project currently undergoing major turmoil, it’s good to remind ourselves that everything is transient: Every project, no matter how technically sophisticated, will eventually fade away, but its best core ideas can - and should - be identified, documented, and get to live on in other projects. So, if nix went away tomorrow, what made it “it”?
I’ve been writing a little web app in rust lately, and in it I decided to try to do it without an ORM. Instead, I modeled data access in a way that resembles the Data Access Layer pattern: You make a set of abstractions that maps the “business logic” to how the data is stored in the data store. Here are some types that I found useful in this journey so far.
Recently, tsnsrv has been getting a lot of high-quality contributions that add better support for Headscale and custom certificates, among other things. As they always do when things change, bugs crept in, and frustratingly, not in a way that existing tests could have caught: Instead of the go code (which has mildly decent test coverage), it was bugs in the nixos module!
This was a great opportunity to investigate if we can test the tsnsrv NixOS module, and maybe improve the baseline quality of the codebase as a whole.
A recent blog post series on the NixOS test driver (part1, part2) made the rounds showing off what it can do, so this felt like a tractable project to take on. Here’s my experience with it.
GitHub have enabled their “merge queue” function, which is really exciting! The “it’s not rocket science rule” of software development is a pretty good guiding principle for developing stuff in a team (if CI is fast, more on that later!) - so I’m very glad it gets easier to achieve.
Unfortunately, it’s only “easier” but not “easy”. I was able to use the feature for about a half year while it was in private beta, and while using it my team and I learned a few lessons that make certain things possible (and some others easier).
Like many people on the internet, I recently saw this great
talk by Xe
Iaso about things you can do on your Tailscale
network with the tsnet package. It got me wondering what more I
could do with tailscale myself. Then, three days later, I noticed that
my Kobo e-reader had stopped syncing with calibre-web and I knew
something about how I accessed my homelab-hosted services would have
to change.
Recently, I needed to debug a particularly nasty interaction between two programs, one of which was a go tool. To get further in understanding the issue, I had to compile a little test program with cgo, the dreaded (by go programmers) compilation mode that allows go programs to call C code. Unfortunately, it’s a bit difficult to find out what to concretely do in order to build a program with cgo.
About 8 years ago, I turned off and carted away the server running boinkmarks (aka autobench), the benchmarking and performance tracker for SBCL. It seems like its last planet.sbcl.org entry was around 2009-04-11.
At the time, it had run benchmarks on every revision1 of SBCL since 2004 - I’d been running it for 8 years, as long as I now have not run it.
Time for a retrospective!
I recently did some minor file name munging in Rust, and was reminded that one of the hard parts about learning a new language is the differences in vocabulary.
In UNIX, there are two command line tools, basename and dirname. They take a pathname as an argument and print a modified pathname to stdout, which is really handy for shell scripts. Several other languages copied that naming convention, and so I was really surprised to find that googling for rust dirname didn’t return anything useful1.
Recently, I started using Anki, a spaced repetition scheduler1, a lot to learn French using the Fluent Forever method, and while there have been setbacks, it’s been a pretty great experience overall. It seems to be super useful for memorizing and retaining all sorts of information! Since I have to memorize all sorts of passwords (phone unlock code, laptop login password, gym locker combination), why not use 1Password to help me retain them?
Why not, indeed!
I’ve been writing a bunch of rust code lately, and it’s been a pretty great experience! The thing I enjoy most about it is that the documentation looks just so extremely good.
Which brings me to my major point of frustration with my rust-writing setup: Writing doc comments in emacs’s otherwise excellent rust-mode is a pain. You always have to insert the doc comment character sequence de la ligne, and writing doctest examples was even worse: You write rust code, inside markdown, in rust comments.