What are you working on this week? (June. 23, 2024)

I'm working on a simple and hackable static site generator, stagnant. I wanted a static site generator that utilized html for templates, so I built it myself to learn rust a bit better.

I’m working through rust-exercises.com and taking notes on my thoughts. I may or may not want to use it for a short workshop at work - mostly for fun, since I work with a very different stack.

So far, I don’t know if I like the exercises, because the target audience doesn’t feel like it’s clearly defined: you both solve is_even with an if/else and overflow an i8 to -1. I don’t think I’ve met the person who is that inexperienced and that knowledgeable…

How are folks liking these exercises?

Working on a blog(entirely for fun), found out the server backend, actix-web, does not handle early termination of a stream well. Wanted to stop an upload if the file size turned out to be too large, but you have to consume the entire upload before returning an error. If not the client will never see the connection close. I guess there is a way to check the size beforehand, but sucks that you can't stop a stream in progress.

Apparently a long standing issue.

I'm working on a music player app written in libcosmic. Trying to see how far I can get with this toolkit.

Apparently generating "Finite Projective Planes". For context on how I got here, I went camping with my family and brought the game Spot It. My brother was analyzing it and came up with the same type of pattern.

When we got home he made a python script to generate these boards, but it was quite slow, so he half joked asking me to rewrite it in Rust.

I kinda struggled a bit since I didn't fully understand what it was doing. Near the end I even got a segfault using safe code😃! (i was spawning a thread with a large stack size, and allocating huge slices on its stack, rather than you know.. boxing the slice Lol.) When I finally got it working, it ended up being in the ballpark of a 23x speedup. Not bad for changing the language choice!

There's lots of room for improvement left for sure. The algorithm could benefit with some running statistics about cols/rows and the algorithm itself is quite naïve and could maybe be improved too :P

Just finished all the Rustlings exercises, moving on to some simple GUI exercises with libcosmic!