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… before taking a hard turn into the private sector to follow my PhD advisor.

Since then, I’ve worked in the computer security space at a couple of different companies. Some don’t exist any more, some you’ve probably heard of. I still program for fun too, and not just in security.

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

Genuary 2023.05: Debug view

2023-02-05
Genuary! Spend a month making one beautiful thing per day, given a bunch of prompts. A month late, but as they say, ’the second best time is now'. Let’s do it! 5) Debug view I like Boids. Here are some Boids with debug vectors drawn showing the three forces acting on them (red to stay away from one another, green to move in the same direction as their friends, blue to move towards the center of their friends).

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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:

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

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Genuary 2023.01: Perfect loop

2023-02-01

Genuary!

Spend a month making one beautiful thing per day, given a bunch of prompts. A month late, but as they say, ’the second best time is now'.

Let’s do it!

1) Perfect loop / Infinite loop / endless GIFs

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Cloning Redis in Rust: RESP [Part 1]

2023-01-31

Recently, I read through Build Your Own Redis with C/C++. C/C++ are ugly, so let’s run through it in Rust!

My goal: implement some large subset of Redis (both server and client) in Rust. For any features I implement, it should be compatible with Redis off the shelf. I should be able to use their client with my server and their server with my client and it should just work.

No idea if this is going to work out, but it sounds like an interesting problem!

First task: the REdis Serialization Protocol (RESP).

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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…

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