September 2019

Abandoning Notify

I made the decision to abandon Notify. I wrote lots about it, both on Github and on Twitter, but the shortest justification is this:

[Notify] sparks negative joy, so I’m Marie-Kondo-ing it out.

Turns out however that abandoning such a large piece of software and my life isn’t simple. I’m not taking it back, ever at all if I can manage it, but getting to the point of it being off my hands completely is not all straightforward. I do hope it gets there soonish, though, because otherwise quite a few crates and part of the ecosystem will start not working anymore.

I also hope I’m making this transition less painful than other abandonments I’ve seen in the OSS space before, though. My goal is to reclaim my own time and joy, not to say fuck you to any part of Rust or cause misery to anyone.

Storq

Hot on the heels of getting way more time, I got some motivation back! Who knew.

Anyway, I started working on Storq again. This is a rename of a project initially called Q, which spawned from a project called Gearbox, which spawned from another project also called Gearbox but not written in Rust. This all started from a musing on making Gearman better, and so Storq is… not that.

Or at least, not recognisably that.

Storq is a construction on top of the Sled embedded advanced key-value store, for the purpose of dynamic work queues with arbitrary ordering controlled by application-provided functions.

At some point after many design drafts and documents I figured that the Gearman queue model was a good idea, but not robust or versatile enough; Storq is the attempt to create a new bedrock for a work processor system inspired by Gearman.

Splash

I’ve also picked back up Splash, my ongoing HF radio propagation tooling endeavour starting with a thoroughly-documented implementation of the ITM.

Holiday

I went on vacation for four weeks to Europe and came back home early this month. It was pretty great!