What programming/technical projects have you been working on?

I started playing with spacetraders.io after it was posted here some months ago.
I wanted to use it as an excuse to put my React learning into actual practice and it's been incredibly educational.
It's been very fun to implement parts of the game in an agile fashion and the API is written in such a way that everything is its own little technical challenge.

I've got a list of ships up and have UI to have them display all their cargo and features. Plus some buttons and nice progress metres to show what they are up to.
Next step is to try and enumerate the market and shipyards so its easier to see where to shop in the sector.
Having a lot of fun with this one, highly recommend!

This week on repeatTest: finished up working on shrinking performance and I’m about to do a release.

Shrinking is a trial-and-error process where the library blindly tries removing data and checks if the test still fails. Most mutations get thrown away. Part of making it fast is using better algorithms (like binary search), but to make each attempt faster, there needs to be a cheap way to record what it did and then throw it away if the attempt isn’t committed. To avoid creating garbage in the inner loop, I ended up doing arena allocation, writing a log consisting of variable-length records to a buffer. Discarding it is just setting the length to zero. When committing, it iterates through the log and builds the new data structure.

Another issue I ran into is how to avoid exporting some methods in a TypeScript class (That is, making them not public outside the library) while still being usable within the same library. Turns out it’s pretty easy:

class Foo {
    private static bar() {
       console.log("this is private");
    }
}
const bar = Foo["bar"];
bar();

Last weekend I finally got around to trying out Nixos on my laptop. I have a fairly new Dell XPS 16 and I had been running Xubuntu on it with a newer kernel to make the audio work, but I hadn't managed yet to get the webcam operational. Since I use the laptop as my daily driver I didn't want to commit to switching distro in case it was too unstable or I didn't like it for some reason. So far so good though!

I now have a set up with Nixos running Hyprland and it was fairly smooth getting it running. I wrote a short blog post about the steps I needed to get the webcam working on the Dell XPS 16. It was a bit involved, but I got a lot less anxious now since Nixos has such a nice way of rolling back changes. I feel I'm a lot less worried about updates breaking things since I can the just roll back! This is also possible for other setups, but with my plain Xubuntu install that was not the case.

I haven't yet experimented with Home Manager, so that might be something I look into next. For now I've just set up my user config the classic way with a bunch of dotfiles. Neovim is installed to my liking with a few plugins I like. I did end up installing Rider for .Net development, the neovim setup with csharp-ls had showed a bunch of spurious errors. So I'll probably dig into that setup too to see if I can ditch it at some point. The refacoring tools on Rider is nice though; and it has a Vim plugin so might not be worth the effort.

Anyway, it was that special kind of nerd fun setting up my system from scratch again :)

I've futzed with WireGuard for a few hours a couple years ago but wasn't able to get it to do what I wanted. I think the main problem was that I didn't have IP forwarding enabled and firewalld was also blocking me but I didn't know that back then.

Recently, I tried tailscale and it's been pretty great! Not bad for a free service... their revenue play seems to be similar to CloudFlare so I'm not too worried about relying on it--in the worst case, I could swap out the server with Headscale which is a bit more setup but seems like a good alternative.

Now that my computers are setup as exit nodes it's very easy to "VPN" via computers that I own (faster and more reliable than OpenVPN, etc). I've started using Fedora IoT which is the atomic version of Fedora Server. It comes with greenboot which will automatically rollback any updates that bring down services (like the tailscale client daemon). Overall, it's been fun to use. I'm pretty impressed with it and I'm more confident in auto-updates now.

I've spent the last few weeks working on and off on an ESP32-S3 telnet server that I could use to play interactive fiction games. I was building it on the JZIP IF Z-machine C source that's been floating around the internet for next to forever. It's gone basically exactly like unorganized "fun projects" tend to go. I.e. I spend entirely too much time thinking about it, make some headway, then hit yet another snag. Just something fun to do.