Yesterday I was following a Twitter thread John Carmack where he was talking about optimizations. Someone suggested he do some sort of a series on how to build game code et cetera. His response was to point to something I’ve never heard of before Handmade Hero. This is a project started by a small group of developers back in 2014. Their goal is to produce the whole game as live coding so people can see how they, professional developers, build a game. I’ve watched previous live coding videos before and enjoyed them. My first was this person writing a vim-like program for CP/M in assembly language, link here. Sounds very dry but I actually get a kick out of seeing how other coders work. I’m just through the first video and am pretty fascinated.

I’ve spent the last few days somewhat diligently playing around with Rust. That’s mostly been studiously reading The Rust Language Book and doing some of the examples. I’m quickly tiring of that and will have to move on to koans, tutorials, or just some projects. However each day I’m learning a bit more about rust. There is a little more insight each day, mostly positive, but one area I am having some concerns is the area of error handling. Specifically I’m concerned about their lack of any traditional exception handling and in its place only returning error objects or panicking (crashing) the whole program.

As I tweeted about over the weekend, I’m going to be starting a month of deep diving into Rust for the month of May. I’m not trying to be a complete convert. I have work to do after all. However I really want to explore this new lower level language as opposed to my day to day work in managed and interpreted languages. I’m going to try to spend an hour or so each day working through tutorials and maybe trying to build my first real application with it. I’m starting with the Rust website seems to have some great resources like a language guide book and tutorials. I’ll go on from there. Today however was just getting the system setup and working through my first hello world tutorials. So far it’s been a mostly positive experience.

I was having a moment of weakness in my quest to permanently get off Facebook. The last two weeks I’ve missed some major things that were happening to some friends and family. Yes, I ultimately learned about it but I learned about it because my spouse is still on Facebook and he made a point of letting me know. At the same time I was still feeling constricted in my ability to discuss things with friends. I had been texting friends through various systems: LinkedIn, SMS, Matrix, iMessage, Twitter DMs, etc. and it occurred to me that all of this would have been in one singular place (Facebook Messenger) before now. So what was the point? Why not, I rationalized, rejoin and figure out how to leverage manual cross posting or some other mechanism to help extract friends from Facebook? Then it struck me, the next book up on my reading list was Steven Levy’s Facebook: The Inside Story. As I wrote on social media perhaps that book would push me one way or the other. Boy did it ever! The book is a great exploration of the entire history of Facebook right up to the present day. While I had mixed emotions earlier in the book as the story of Facebook went on so too did my revulsion to the idea of every going back.

I’ve spent today dusting off my old code Diaspora API driven blog comment system. The details of that implementation can be found in this blog post from late-2018. Now that it is running on a production server thanks to Diaspora-Fr I have revived the code running on the server and pointed it to their Diaspora server. I never coded up a full handshake for the initial authentication steps so that is all manual unfortunately, but I believe it is now up and running. The way I coded the server it can only point to one host at a time but since this is proof of concept right now that’s legit. For the time being I’ll be linking against that Diaspora server for comments on threads. You can comment from any Diaspora server though, not just that one. If you don’t have a Diaspora login then you can simply read the comments.