September 2018

Medical

I got some dental surgery done at long last early this month, and the recovery was somewhat longer than I’d thought, which didn’t help with projects. I’m all good now, though! (And two teeth lighter.)

Watchexec

This month I volunteered to take on the Watchexec project, to ensure that pull requests and issues and new features would be finally tackled. Matt Green, the project’s originator and principal author up til now, has recently gotten more busy at work and most importantly, become a first-time parent. Congratulations to him! That did mean that there was no more time for the project.

I spent a few evenings reviewing the entire source and looking through all issues and pull requests, then made my first release on Sunday 19th, and another one on Sunday 9th after a little more coding to smooth over old PRs. I hope to work through more of the issues as we go through, but I am very aware that this is yet another project on top of my stack of already pending stuff, so I’m pacing myself with a lot of care.

Notify

Notify advances slowly. This is mostly a matter of time, now: most of the framework is ready and awaits only filling up the gaps.

I am getting very interesting snapshots of futures 0.3 and the async/await support in Rust itself, which could mean improved ergonomics and better development. In the meantime, though, I’m keeping with what I have.

The Rust inotify wrapper has recently gained a feature to use futures and Tokio Reform, which might make it a lot easier to integrate, although it may be that the access I require for the Backend is too advanced for the nicely-wrapped version. To be seen.

A wonderful contributor has spent some time upgrading all of the libraries in the v4 branch. This will likely be the last release with the old code!

Splash

My mysteriously-named project is a foray into some really old code, and a documentation effort more than a coding effort. It’s a nice change of pace, even though it can be really intense… I like it for the different kind of work.

Perhaps it will see a release this summer, but with everything else piled on, I’m making myself no promises.

Certainly

Frustrated by the awful state of certificate tooling, especially for such common things as generating self-signed certificates, I made a small tool that makes the whole thing as easy and simple as possible! It especially excels at multidomain certificates, and has an extra feature to be able to create a local CA and sign certificates that way. All in minimal fuss and no ambiguity:

$ certainly test.com
Writing test.com.key
Writing test.com.crt

I also took what I learned from Watchexec and Cargo Watch, and set up prebuilt binaries for Linux, Windows, macOS, as well as a Debian deb… for ease of use!

10 minutes

My star wars fanfic is stalled!

…no, it’s not. It’s just that with everything else, I thought I would get the chance to work at the chapter last month, but I didn’t. So it’s still getting pushed away to the next opportunity.