Birkana in Rust with HTTP

Recently I read this awesome article about representing hexadecimal numbers using runic system. So I created this little program that takes hexadecimal string on stdin and spits out SVG data on stdout.

Github link.

To make it easier, and also to learn about state of Rust’s HTTP frameworks, I wrote a small HTTP server for this, and it is open to the public.

Github link.

Lessons learned:

Nanny

Nanny is a monitoring tool that monitors the absence of activity.

Nanny runs an API server, which expects to be called every N seconds, and if no such call is made, Nanny notifies you.

Nanny can notify you via these channels (for now):

• print text to stderr
• email
• sentry
• sms (twilio)
• slack (webhook)
• generic webhook (HTTP POST callback)
• xmpp (jabber)

Usecase?

Ever wrote invalid crontab record? Ever had it call bash script that failed silently without doing what you wanted, and you noticed months later? Thats why.

Diskspace Notify

Checks periodically for free disk space and alerts user via email when there is not enough free space (threshold set in config).

It does not aim to replace any large monitoring tools, origin of this tool is pretty simple. I ran out of disk space on my root partition, which caused it to break.

I was suprised initially, why would you not be able to ssh onto a machine that ran out of space on / partition? Turns out, that if sshd can’t log even 1 byte to syslog, it just stops.

State of software in 2018

It is now year 2018.

Last year has seen some large strides in our technological prowess. All the big companies are now making AI personal asistants, smartphones in our pockets are more powerful than ever, you can shoot videos in 4k resolution with 60 frames per second, you can use software to make your photos much better instead of having actual optics. It is surely great time to be alive.

Fail Fast

Do you remember all the posts about new businesses (read startups) need to fail fast (Business section)? Release first version as soon as possible to make them competitive? (insert peperidge farm meme here, haha)

Recently it seems to me like almost every company adopted this startup mentality in their products. While I understand the need to release your product before the competition does, I disagree with using the consumer of said product as a beta-tester.