Just side projects building web severs for fun and to learn more about rust.

I have lovingly called my new tech stack SHART

-SQLX -HTMX -ASKAMA -RUST -TOKIO

Looking at it longingly while I update another legacy C project.

I’ve mostly done hobby projects with rust.

• axum + mongodb + oauth2 (just basic rest api)

• rust-bert ( for some nlp stuff. Zero-shot, NER, etc.)

• Bevy ( I was following a tutorial for a super basic space invaders game)

I chose rust because I always like to have some kind of systems level programming language on my belt. It used to be c++. Rust had seemed very interesting so I began trying it out more and more. It’s awesome.

I mostly use it for hobby projects. For example:

• lemmy alternative - I’m using Iroh and Tauri to create a distributed lemmy-like application (mostly wanted an excuse to play with async Rust)
• Godot game projects - GDScript for most things, Rust for more intense processing - not a fan of C++, and everything else is similarly awkward, so picked Rust because I like it
• small web projects - I built a game server that did interesting things with different socket types (websockets, TCP, and UDP); wanted correctness since I’m doing a lot of async stuff; I’ve used Go for this kind of thing in the past, but I don’t like some of the footguns it has

I’d love to use it at work, but my team is mostly Python-centric and it’s working well enough for us.

Everything basically.

• Ricochet Robots solver.
• A CLI tool to add timestamps and time since last log annotations when watching logs in a terminal.
• A few random games.
• RSS to Email service.
• Making a CRDT library that embeds well in programs.
• A tool for uploading journald log files to log aggregation services.
• Some machine learning experiments.
• A tiny library to implement rate limits.

I’m doing mostly hobby graphics stuff with wgpu

My latest project is a live visualizer of wgsl shaders.

I chose rust because it’s the only language that meets all these points:

• Compiled (which implies it will be fast and native)
• no GCC (which means it will be faster if used correctly)
• it’s not a pain to work with (unlike C and C++). The IDE is great and simple, the build tools (cargo) are great and simple, static linking by default (no missing .dll/.so errors)
• Fast development times. Runtime errors are very limited, so you go slow (addressing the very common compiler errors) so you can go fast (very little debugging in comparison with other languages).
• enums. Rust’s type system is great, specially the enums and pattern matching.
• static and explicit typing: no surprises, everything is in the function header.
• inmutable values by default: mutable values are explicitly stated as so.

Currently writing a distributed file system that if all goes well, can replace my current Nextcloud (which annoyed me one too many times) and NFS (which is unusable over the internet).

attempting to build a database normalization checker up to 4NF. Also forking some Spotify client and modifying it to work with the Soulseek network has been in my bucket list for a long time

Nothing of value. Please don’t sue me.

I’m still part of the RUST EVANGELISM STRIKE FORCE, promise

Crying over some C code I have to work with. I’m supposed to do a quick proof of concept but with all data passed by global variable.

My use for rust at work have been to avoid C when using third party libraries. Rust bindgen is very nice to use. This way I get to use a modern language instead of C. Also replaced some java for a performance critical media monitor and xfer engine. On my spare time I have been doing some minor hacking for fun on Cosmic Term

I wanted to learn and I do that best by making games (find it holds my attention), found it a mixed bag, in that Bevy is quickly becoming the de-facto game engine in Rust (I know not strictly true but it is very popular), however that involves learning Bevy, rather than Rust.

So instead recently I’ve started making games with Yew (Web lib, using WASM) and Warp, to get to grips with those. I’ve been doing a game dev live stream too, where I work on a project (FOSS) to try and show the stuff I learned. Mostly just for the enjoyment of solving maths problems with an audience!

Sadly when I was laid off last year I couldn’t find anything in Rust but I’m hoping my next contract might involve at least some.

I did a hobby project, a cross platform app controlling WeMo smart switches. Due to using FLTK_rs it works on Windows, Linux and macOS. Was amazed how quickly the code works after compiling. A lot of time is saved in development due to less debugging.

• A kind of reverse proxy which wraps a rest api and makes it compatible with a shitty app that uses said api.

• A CLI tool to write SDN configurations into the SDN orchestrator’s rest api based upon yaml files so that networking people don’t have to use the terrible GUI.

• Another CLI tool which automatically reads credentials from the terrible CyberAIDS centralised credential management system and provides it to the OpenSSH client so that ssh users don’t have to copy/paste a billion different passwords a billion times a day. (Yes, use keys, I know, but corporate bullshit wants it this way.)

I’m doing Game Dev with Rust (Godot + gdext in my case). Sadly it’s just hobby projects, but would love to actually use rust (at all) at work.

I choose Rust over other languages (C#, Python, GDScript, C++, etc), because I enjoy writing in Rust.

I love that it’s so concise and easy to read, while providing super useful errors at compile time, and great auto-completion thanks to the rust-analyzer. Despite it being a much more complicated languages than almost even C++, it provides so much useful information when writing/compiling, that running can be mostly taken for granted (but shouldn’t of course).

I don’t need to worry about types or pointers, but rather about writing what I want in Rust, which is simply too much fun.