Progress on the bevy front

Through a series of very cool events, I was finally able to finish up the bevy primitives gizmo PR. To be honest, it wasn't my merit at all. A thousand thanks go out to my dear friend noth who was the one who lifted my blind folds and helped me to cross the finish line. In the end it wasn't as complicated as I initially thought it would be. The solution included the removal of one of two lifetimes. I felt a bit stupid after finding that out but that was overshadowed by the pure happiness I felt when I know this PR would be in the reviewing phase soon. So I spend the next day cleaning up that PR, added docs to it, added examples to it and so on.

A big chunk was actually splitting it up into two orthogonal PRs since I needed to implement 3D arcs for convenience while drawing round shapes. Since they weren't there before we could nicely split that up. As it turned out my initial implementation which followed the Unity API was not that handy and had some flaws. So I spent some time fixing it with a custom made solution. In the end I was also able to implement another smooth arc method which made me even happier. After all I'm pretty satisfied with all of the code in this PR.

I noticed that all of my blog posts with pictures were much more enjoyable to myself. So I'm just gonna add some here as well. Be ready for a few random pictures here and there.

After some time had passed I got another review for the PR and after addressing all of the issues there, it looks pretty clean and good to merge now.

Update

The PR finally got merged and now it'll even get its own little section in the next bevy migration guide / changelog thingy. Cool! 😎

School - HEG - Working with the petstore API

This week we further worked with the petstore swagger playground API (https://petstore.swagger.io/). After some small repetitions at the start, we went ahead and introduced ourselves to serde and serde_json. With this we created our own little Pet struct to deserialize the data from the API. This resulted in a huge list of pets and gave us our first big set of data to work on directly in Rust.

A lot of the pets were named "doggie" (which is the fields default value), so the students began to wonder which other names were there in the set. Manually scrolling through the list took ages and so this was the perfect opportunity to count the occurrences of each name programmaticly. We implemented it via a HashMap. Retrospectively, this was a mistake though. I probably gave bad examples (dictionaries) and wasn't really prepared to explain the concept well. This led to some confusion amongst the students which was a bit unfortunate. In the end they probably grasped the rough concept, although they were still a bit confused by the details.

Next week I'll try to resolve the last confusions therea hopefully.

fjo progress

This week I found some time to put into fjo again. noth needed a bit of help with the pr create feature. The main issue here is the following: It's surprisingly hard to kind of sort the branches in git by expected priority. Give the goal that we want to show the users:

1. A list of branches that are mergeable 2. A list of branches the selection of 1. can be merged into

We opted for letting the user decide everything manually via fuzzy search and then adding some hard coded options at the start, e.g. tranzystorekk noted that there is a default_branch field on the repository data coming from the API which can be used for this.

Implementing this was easy, but right after that another problem appeared. With the current implementation of things, we're not able to merge branches from forked repos back into the branches of the repo we forked. This is, of course, sub-optimal since that is a major workflow in open source work. So in the end we went back to the drawing board yet again.

Figuring out how to do this wasn't that easy actually. Forgejo didn't have real documentation of that use case of the API and so we did a lot of trial-and-error requests until it eventually worked. The merge a branch from a fork Foo of repository Bar we need to use the API endpoint on repository Foo with arguments

• head: Bar:bar-branch
• base: foo-branch

Knowing this, the rest was just a matter of implementation. While doing so, there were some other smaller bugs unveiled which were mostly easy to fix. With the help and inspiration of team voidd this should feel really smooth from a user perspective now.

After all, this issue was quiet a ride!

The final merge of the first part of the big rewrite gets really close now. Only one more task and we're done for now! I'll tackle that next week.

Yubikeys: Backup + Expiration

Uggh, not sure what to write here. That was mainly a pain again. Of course I did some mistakes on the first two tries such that I robotically could type in all the commands from memory on the third try. Then it worked and now I'm owning a second functional Yubikey which gives my mind a tiny bit more peace. Nevertheless this isn't the end of the story. I can't use the new Yubikey on my password-store yet. After a small search it seems like I need to configure a key-ring to encrypt my password-store with both keys at once and to be able to decrypt it with either one. That seems to be a task for next week let's see.

The other good news are, that I successfully did the expiration date prolonging workflow and can do that pretty reliably now.

Nix: A lot of tiny explorations

After un-fucking my .sops.yaml I was finally able to do some work on the server again. Here's what I did this week.

Honey Pot

I'm not sure if it's smart to write about this here 😅 Anyways, it shouldn't hurt. The first thing I set up was an endlessh honeypot on the ssh port of my server. This should prevent a good fraction automated attacks and make it more secure. It was pretty straightforward to do that with nix. I literally just added a few lines. Of course I did a funny by blocking myself (or rather colmena) at first with this. But colmena exposed some options to use the new secret ssh port.

ACME maintenance

Last week I got a scary email that told me that all of the certificates were expiring in 30 days and that the matrix server would most likely not be working without this anymore 😱 However, this was also quickly fixed after I could reach my server again by setting one option in nix. Now the certificate is renewed daily.

Grafana and Prometheus exploration

I toyed a bit around with grafana and prometheus to get some metrics from my local machine. I used this blog post as a guide and everything worked more or less pretty straightforward. I'm not really sure if I really want that on the server though. Maybe something for the mid-term future.

static website

By using the Static Web Server service in nix. I also changed the website of team voidd to some placeholder instead of using the default nginx landing page. That also was easy to do with nix. I'll probably work on a zola static site generation in the future.