The earliest memory I have of ‘programming’ is in the early/mid 90s when my father brought home a computer from work. We could play games on it … so of course I took the spreadsheet program he used (LOTUS 123, did I date myself with that?) and tried to modify it to print out a helpful message for him. It … halfway worked? At least I could undo it so he could get back to work…

After that, I picked up programming for real in QBASIC (I still have a few of those programs lying around), got my own (junky) Linux desktop from my cousin, tried to learn VBasic (without a Windows machine), and eventually made it to high school… In college, I studied computer science and mathematics, mostly programming in Java/.NET, although with a bit of everything in the mix. A few of my oldest programming posts on this blog are from that time.

After that, on to grad school! Originally, I was going to study computational linguistics, but that fell through. Then programming languages (the school’s specialty). And finally I ended up studying censorship and computer security. That’s about where I am today!

But really, I still have a habit of doing a little bit of everything. Whatever seems interesting at the time!

Popular Github Repos

ascii-canvas -- 11☆2ᛘ
house-on-the-hill -- 11☆
dnsscan -- 10☆8ᛘ
ios-backup -- 9☆
dotfiles -- 7☆3ᛘ
backup -- 4☆
chess-puzzles -- 3☆
advent-of-code -- 2☆
bit-struct -- 2☆1ᛘ
abc -- 1☆

Posts

Redis in Rust: An Echo Server [Part 2]

2023-02-04

Following up from Cloning Redis in Rust: RESP [Part 1], we can parse the protocol. So now… let’s do something with it.

The obvious(ish) next step, in my mind? Make a server. It’s all going to be over the network eventually, so it’s either here or storing data. Here it is!

Specifically, my goal is not to build the networking and data structures for this project from scratch. Where there are primitives or libraries that will do something like networking for me, I’m going to use them.

Ergo:

tokio for networking (+ async)
tracing for logging

So, how do I write a simple server in Tokio?

Next/Previous 'Space' in Hammerspoon

2023-01-30

A quick somewhat hacky followup to Once Again, to Hammerspoon: moving windows to the next/previous Space on a single screen.

Once Again, to Hammerspoon

2023-01-23

Why oh why doesn’t macOS have a more powerful window manager…

Once upon a time, I moved from primarily Windows to primarily (at the time) OSX. I missed Aerospace–the ability to use Win+Left/Right to snap windows to half the screen–so I wrote a fix: Duplicating AeroSnap on OSX with Hammerspoon.

Since then, I eventually discovered and moved to Magnet and all was well.

But more recently, I’ve been wanting two things:

a bit more control (once again), to define more arbitrary sizes and keystrokes
the ability to automatically arrange windows to various Mission Control Spaces

And what a journey it’s been…

Local JS/CSS with Hugo Pipe

2023-01-19

I recently stumbled across a post that reminded me that Hugo has pipes. You can use them to automatically download files and include them as local. This seems like a pretty good idea for JS/CSS (you can argue caching versus security/locality all you want), but I’m going to give it a try.

Proc Macro Workshop: derive(Builder) [Part 2]

2023-01-17

Okay, in Proc Macro Workshop: derive(Builder) [Part 1] we created a derive(Builder) macro to implement the builder pattern. We created a new *Builder struct, created methods to set each field in a chain, and allowed some fields to be optional.

So what’s left? (Be sure to start with Part 1 if you haven’t read that!)

Let’s do this!