It’s been a good summer so far. Some things I’ve been up to:

systemctl-tui

I got annoyed that I couldn’t find a decent GUI for systemd services, so I built one:

It was partially an excuse to experiment with ratatui for terminal UIs in Rust, and I think I like it quite a bit. ratatui gives you tools you need to do immediate-mode rendering efficiently, but the broad strokes of your application’s architecture are up to you.

Gardening + Patio

I spent more time than usual on our little outdoor space. Lots of flowers, a new planter, pressure washing, etc.

I’ve organized a fair number of get-togethers/dinners on the patio, it’s been really nice meeting new people and catching up with people who I haven’t seen since before the pandemic.

New ‘Puter

I finally took the plunge and bought a Framework Laptop:

Intel’s multicore performance has gotten a lot better in recent generations, so I figured I could replace my desktop for Rust work. So far, so good!

I like the hardware a lot. There were some teething pains getting Linux working properly, but that kinda comes with the territory.

I find working on my personal website to be soothing. It’s one of those never-ending projects in a good way, and I work on it in small bursts of energy whenever I have the time and inspiration. I’ve added a handful of new features in recent months and, uh, I’m sorry.

Some of these features are an attempt to revisit the glory that was the Geocities-era web; you might have noticed the glittery cursor trail (based on the excellent cursor-effects), or the animated snowy background that only shows up in December.

I’ve added custom emoji that I can easily use throughout the website (with Hugo shortcodes), here’s a small sample:

I use a lot of custom emoji on Slack and Discord; adding them to my website was the logical next step. I’ve also been toying with the idea of letting readers emoji-react to my blog posts but haven’t quite come up with a design I’m happy with. Speaking of emoji…

Whoa, what’s this?

I also added these, uh, Socratic dialogue bubbles between me and arbitrary emoji heads. These are heavily inspired by “Cool Bear” but with more characters because why not?

Got it. I’m sure everyone will love this and nobody will find it annoying.

These features are pretty dumb and they’d never make it past design review in the real world. In a way, that’s the point. Let’s make websites fun again.

Nushell

Nushell v0.60 is out, and it’s fantastic. This is the first Nu release where I made meaningful contributions (mostly to the website+documentation) and it feels like a good use of my sabbatical time. It’s been interesting figuring out how to sell+explain Nu succinctly; writing good public-facing documentation is hard!

If you haven’t tried Nu, this is a great time to do so; Nu’s not stable yet, but I think you’ll be very pleasantly surprised by the level of polish. I’ve finally made it my default shell on both Windows+Linux.

Most of the work I’m doing for Nushell has a selfish motivation: I want to live in a world where POSIX shells are a thing of the past, and Nushell seems like the most promising way to get there.

Learning

I’ve started working through Crafting Interpreters by Bob Nystrom. My first exposure to Nystrom’s work was Game Programming Patterns, one of the best programming books I’ve ever read. The title’s a little unfortunate because it covers design patterns that are useful in any field of programming; I genuinely think GPP is much more useful to today’s programmer than the book that inspired it.

Crafting Interpreters walks you through building a scripting language from the ground up. The book walks you through an interpreter implementation in Java then C; I’m doing the Java version in C# (personal preference and experience).

Other

I’ve started rekindling some old friendships with people I haven’t seen in person in 2 years, and that’s been really great.

Spring is finally arriving here in Vancouver, so I’ve been finding lots of excuses to be outdoors. My patio’s never been cleaner and I’m looking forward to a lot of spring gardening. I’d like to get some more trellises set up this year; I have a fairly small urban patio so it’s important to make good use of vertical space. “Green to the eye, not green on the ground.”

“Work”

I’ve been spending a lot of time writing Nushell documentation. The Nushell core team has been banging out new features rapidly and the documentation hasn’t always kept up; improving the documentation feels like a high-impact way to help out.

Nushell’s got a big release coming up later this month and it has the potential to attract many new users. I want the documentation to be in a better place by then, I’m going to keep spending time on this.

I’ve tried to make a few commits to Nushell itself, but I keep bouncing off Rust. I’m reasonably familiar with Rust, but this is my first time working on a big Rust project. The compile times are painful and they inhibit rapid iteration; I haven’t found a development approach that I like yet.

Reading

Anthony Bourdain’s Typhoid Mary was pretty disappointing (3 stars?); you can tell that Bourdain was short on source material so most of the book is him imagining what Mary might have done.

I started rereading the Wheel of Time series in December and I’m on book 9 now. My interest started to wane around book 8; I think I’ll press onward but I’m really looking forward to the later books (written by another author).

Other

I think I’m a Dance Dance Revolution guy now. I ordered a fancy mat from Poland and have been playing Club Fantastic. I’m still pretty bad but it’s a lot of fun.

I’m officially unemployed again 😎. In the interest of self-accountability, I’m going to try to document what I’m up to on my break; expect more frequent updates to this blog.

HYTRADBOI

I bought a ticket to Have You Tried Rubbing A Database On It?, which could loosely be described as a hipster database conference; lots of people using databases in unusual ways, not much in the way of enterprise RDBMSs. The speaker list is like a Who’s Who for offbeat database work, and I’m really looking forward to it.

Nushell

I’ve been using Nushell as my shell on both Windows and Linux, about half the time. Nushell is a fascinating project; it’s a shell that operates on structured data like PowerShell, but without PowerShell’s (many) pain points.

Nushell has recently seen some massive upgrades (the parsing and evaluation engine was completely rewritten) and it’s a very good time to give it a try. It’s still early days, but I’m hopeful Nushell will be able to displace POSIX shells; it’s liberating to work with much richer data types than plain text:

Nu is a way of saying “what if we didn’t need tools like awk so often?” Since you’re working with structured data, as we add more support for file types, it’s less often you need to reach for “awk”, “jq”, “grep”, and the array of other tools to open and work with common file types. In a way, it’s taking the original spirit of Unix — where you use pipelines to combine a set of tools — and imagining how that original spirit would work today, with what we know about programming languages and tools.

Building data-centric apps with a reactive relational database

This essay touches on a lot of my favourite things: SQLite! The intersection of native apps and web UI! iTunes clones! In a nutshell, it’s a very cool approach to building GUI applications in which all of the application’s state lives in a local database.

It’s more of a provocation than a fully finished system, but I think it shows promise. I’d like to see a bit more investigation of “escape hatches”; how hard would it be mix in a little imperative code when SQL/SQLite aren’t the right fit for a task? Also, this was a bit depressing:

One challenge has been inter-process communication. When the reactive graph is running in the UI thread and the SQLite database is on a web worker or native process, each query results in an asynchronous call that has to serialize and deserialize data.

This would have been a non-issue in traditional GUI code (just query SQLite on a background thread in the same process); one more thing we lose as web UI takes over, I guess 😞.