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What programming/technical projects have you been working on?
This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?
I'm getting antsy waiting on a vulnerability I reported to go through the process.
The company I reported the vuln to has supposedly been working on a patch. I haven't heard from them in a month though. I also filed with MITRE to reserve a CVE for it for when I publish report and proof of concept, but I haven't heard from them in a month either.
This is my first time reporting a vulnerability. I know that I should just be patient with this process. But there is a constant nagging feeling that if I just published, the process would suddenly speed up and gears would start turning. But I have to convince myself that the gears are already turning, even though I don't get to sit here and watch them.
If the company has been taking this long to write the patch, I'm hoping it means that it'll be a worthwhile one (they attempted to patch this previously, but failed to resolve the underlying issue). And MITRE could very easily just have a lot of their plate right now.
The main reason I'm antsy about it is that I'd eager to start applying to tech jobs, and I'd really like to be able to put this project on my resume. But as it stands, it's likely that I'll be waiting until mid Dec to be able to do so. I can live with that though. In the meantime, I've been working on writing up articles on other projects in order to illustrate some competency and experience despite not having actual work experience.
I'm working on a personal library tool, specifically designed around fanfiction and other works that are published serially rather than all at once. I follow a lot of stories that aren't yet marked complete, and I find that it can be really hard to keep what I'm following in my mind so that I remember to check up on them. I wanted a solution that:
I did some looking for a tool that fit all of those marks and didn't find one, so I'm doing it myself. I'm writing it in Rust, because a good concurrency story is helpful when much of your program's work is "download a lot of things from the internet" and also just because I like it, and I've actually made a lot of progress over the past few weeks! I can download and store stories from the handful of websites that I use most often, so my next task is tracking read status of chapters and implementing a UI of some sort — possibly two, because I'm thinking I might go in the direction of having a choice between TUI and web-based interfaces.
As a fanfic addict of more than a decade now, this sounds like it might be the best personal project ever made. Would the tool work with any source, e.g. FFnet, AO3? I’ve only relatively recently made the jump from the former to the latter. Also, given that the tool is completed, would you be willing to distribute it? From a programming perspective, I’d love to be able to see how it ends up being put together, if at all possible.
Thank you for the kind words! Right now it handles AO3, RoyalRoad, and Xenforo threadmarks (currently only SpaceBattles and SufficientVelocity, but the parser should work for any Xenforo site once I make the stuff around it smart enough to realize that a URL is, in fact, running Xenforo). I would love to add FFnet support, but I have some work left to do there — I haven't figured out how to get around its CloudFlare protections yet. As soon as I do, though, it's going in!
Right now the source code is sitting on a personal git server (shout out to soft serve for making that easy) but I can stick it out on GitHub and make it publicly available, sure! It's not ready like I would like it to be, but it's ready enough that I think other people could maybe get some value out of it. I probably won't get around to it this weekend because I'm super busy, but maybe next week. Pester me about it if I don't chime in on next week's thread. :)
I've gotten a bit back into a compression-oriented project that I've posted about before. When I was on-off working on it, I've been nerdsniped repeatedly into trying to come up with an alternative archiving container format, researching other formats, and trying to think about if something existing may suit my use case. I'm sure to come back to this a whole bunch more because I am a fool.
Anyway, as a byproduct of this, I've also been looking into GUI stuff, since I want the compressor/decompressor to be used by more nontechnical people. (This also led to a tangentially related side rabbit hole of looking at WinAPI stuff.) It's hard to find good comparisons between Qt and GTK; most of them online are from people comparing GNOME and KDE as desktop environments from a user perspective, or individual application performance, and not the UI toolkits from a developer perspective. It's hard for me since the only UI work I've done is maintaining Windows apps and some React/Vue. It's doubly hard because I'm doing this in Rust at the moment, which doesn't quite have the same support as some other languages. The front-running library seems to be Tauri for some reason (basically Electron but using the native system WebView), and I'll use it if I have no other choice, but I'm looking for some other options and cutting my teeth on them. I'll probably be learning some GTK over the next bit, from the looks of things.