Recent articles

Elm and the art of limitations

Putting the "art" in "artisanal code".

SELECT * FROM clickbait()

Using DataFusion to expose a tree data structure as SQL tables over MCP.

Fault-tolerant stolen WiFi

After rage-quitting my ISP, I set up redundant WiFi through multiple neighbors.

Engineering MCP tools for token efficiency

Making MCP tool definitions smaller using snapshot testing, and why context window space matters.

The elements of Rust error handling

Basics of error handling in Rust are well explored, but above are degrees of freedom not examined often enough.

Wasm for the impatient

Wasm is a virtual machine-based binary code and module format, available as compilation target for many other languages. This article contains a succinct description from the ground up.

Build, don't call

Replace complicated function calls with builders to make your and your reviewer's life easier.

Wrapping SQLite's UTF-8 strings using Rust's FFI

Wrapping raw pointers to UTF-8 encoded text from SQLite allows offloading a lot of safety checks to the Rust compiler, but requires a lot of detailed insights into the workings of both SQLite and memory allocation.

Safely opening (and closing) an SQLite database

Wrapping a C library in Rust beyond the pure FFI interface is straightforward, but has a surprising amounts of details to consider.

About things

A short summary of what these pages are about.

Owning Your Invariants

Don't just leverage the type checker for correctness of business logic, the borrow checker can help, too.

Quick static site deployment

A combination of hugo and nix can be used to have an automated site deployment for free in under 40 lines of code.

Tracing for the impatient

Tracing is a flexible improvement over the traditional log crate, with great features and an async footgun.

Kubernetes and nsswitch.conf in nix containers

Those who do not know about nsswitch.conf are going to have a bad time.

Nix based continuous integration

Keep build logic out of your CI configuration to be able run it on your devs machines.

Containerless development environments

nix-shell actually delivers stable build environments in a much better way than a development Docker container can.

The second best build system

Your Makefile is likely a glorified shell script - create a much simpler build.sh instead!