Weeknotes 2025 W16: 70k rps

Quick bits:

• Enjoying the long Easter weekend. I deserve a good break!

• I had my first Mozartkugel ever! They are rather tasty. I’m rather fond of marzipan.

• I found out that text-indent in CSS can also do hanging indentation. text-indent: 3em hanging; indents all but the first line. Neat! But unfortunately, this is only supported in Firefox and Safari.

• I’ve been spending more time again on fiction writing, both short stories and longer-form text, but also been diving into interactive fiction once again. I am enjoying Ink quite a bit.

• Since it came up the other day: I dislike low-code and no-code tools because they generally lack support for “code” reviews, version control, testing, have little to no established practices, and lack third-party libraries. Rarely do I find anything built with a low-code or no-code tool that works well and can be extended easily.

• For my expression parsing article, I’ve come to realize that a large part of the problem is that the technique is quite hard to describe with just text and code. I’m working on illustrations for it, but that is rather a can of worms, too.¹¹1 I wanted to make the illustrations interactive at first. That’d be an even bigger can of worms.  The whole article sure is taking its time, but that’s because I want to write something that worth it.

Shower thoughts:

• If you’re having trouble with Single Sing-on (SSO)… try moving closer to the microphone and relaxing your jaw.

I created dflag, a simple feature flag server with a static configuration. I’ve had this on my list of ideas for quite some time, and suddenly got the motivation to implement a first version of this.

The reason why I made this is primarily because I could: I don’t plan on using it, but perhaps it inspires someone.

The existing open-source solutions for feature-flagging are overly complex and don’t work well, and self-hosting is often not trivial. On the other side of the spectrum, commercial solutions are good but often prohibitively expensive.

The idea behind my particular implementation is a static plain-text file as the source of feature flags. It’s as simple as can be, but nonetheless distinctly useful for organizations just starting out with feature flags.

And because the data source is a plain-text file loaded into memory, a single instance on a single core can handle 70k+ requests per second with a p99 latency under 1ms,²²2 Tested with wrk.  while using just a dozen MiB of memory. Not bad.

What are my future plans for this project? Maybe nothing. The Git repository has just one commit right now, and I might just keep it that way.

Entertainment:

• I picked up Myst Online: Uru Live³³3 Myst Online: Uru Live (Cyan Worlds, 2007), published by Cyan Worlds.  after about a decade or so. It’s far older-looking and clunkier than I remembered, though it was nice to visit some new places that have been added in the last few years. It’s still being updated, which I think is amazing. Though strangely, I got treated rather rudely by another player who insisted on being social rather than letting me explore by myself.

• Sharper⁴⁴4 Sharper, directed by Benjamin Caron, written by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka (A24, Apple TV+, Picturestart, 2023).  is a witty crime thriller that had me a few times.

• I restarted Mask of the Rose⁵⁵5 Mask of the Rose (Failbetter Games, 2023), published by Failbetter Games.  after having bought it last year and not really getting into it.⁶⁶6 I didn’t even mention the game in my week­notes!  I am enjoying it more now, though I do not at all care about the dating sim aspect.

• I revisited Blackwell Legacy,⁷⁷7 Blackwell Legacy (Wadjet Eye Games, 2006), published by Wadjet Eye Games.  having had good memories of the game from back in the day. But I struggled: it is dated in terms of UI and gameplay, and the story is remarkably short. The puzzles also don’t really make much sense.

• I have finally bought Morrowind⁸⁸8 The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (Bethesda Game Studios, 2002), published by Ubisoft.  but, as is customary these days, I have spent most of my time installing mods. I will let you know when I actually start playing.

Toots and skeets:

• “Kids are unintentionally curious. What happens when I flush this rug? Would my cat enjoy wearing a fancy dress? Could this LEGO head also be a cool hat? Without regard to topic, try not to lose what’s left of your unintentional curiosity.” — Merlin Mann

Links:

• Love (Official Video) (OK Go): They’ve outdone themselves once more.

• I Spent 30 Days in a Dead Game (globert): This is remarkably wholesome.

• Falling Fruit

• Introducing Kermit: A typeface for kids (Microsoft Design): Neat!

Tech links:

• The Pervert's Guide to Computer Programming Languages (W. Watson): Funny yet insightful!

• Unpowered SSD endurance investigation finds severe data loss and performance issues (Mark Tyson for Tom’s Hardware): Eek — here I thought SSDs were much more reliable that way.

• No Web Without Women: I’ve linked to this before but it is worth linking to again.

• Unbundling Tools for Thought (Fernando Borretti): I still want to build a collection-management solution myself: a personal database app.

• Always deploy at peak traffic (Swizec Teller): At SoundCloud, I felt comfortable doing frequent deployments. But at the startup afterwards, every single deploy made me anxious, for the precise reason Swizec lays out.

• Test, Save, and Execute HTTP Requests with Hurl (or restclient.el) (Christian Tietze): I hadn’t heard of Hurl before, and it looks great to have in one’s toolbox!

• Comfy Software: I like this idea.