James McMurray's Blog

Rust, Linux and other curiosities

My First Clippy Lint

Recently I wrote my first Clippy lint. It was much easier to implement and test than I had expected. In this post I'll review the process of creating or contributing to a Clippy lint, the implementation itself and how this reflects Rust's values of empowerment.



What should I program?

Doing projects is often the best way to get more programming experience and learn about new concepts and problem domains. However, a common issue is finding feasible projects of a reasonable scope that can produce something useful in a few weekends.

In this post I will list some classic project ideas for beginner and intermediate programmers (most of which should be achievable in 2-3 weekends), along with many other project ideas I've had but have never had time to implement (and a few which I did).

There are many long lists of project ideas available on Github, like build-your-own-x and 100 Projects of Code but these often lack a real description and justification of the projects. In this article I will go more in-depth with the different project ideas.

Within each section the projects are ordered in ascending difficulty / time investment.





Using ALMA for persistent LiveUSB installations of Arch Linux

ALMA (available as alma-git on the AUR) is a tool for creating persistent LiveUSB installations of Arch Linux. With one command you can generate a customised installation on a USB stick (or any other removable media) including the packages and config files you want, with full persistence.

This is very useful for disk recovery and system maintenance, and a great tool for all Linux users. Especially with the customisation options provided by collections of preset files (such as arch-i3-usb).


Retrospective of my first useful Rust project

This post is a retrospective of my first "useful" Rust project. vopono is a Linux program to launch applications in temporary network namespaces (managed by vopono), in order to run specific applications through VPN connections, without affecting the rest of your system.

vopono is available on Github (and in the AUR on Arch Linux) and licensed under the GPLv3 license (see reasoning here).

We'll consider the motivation and background to creating vopono, the upsides and downsides of writing it in Rust (and existing issues), and some points about starting new side projects in general. I hope this helps new Rust programmers starting their own first projects, or for other programmers to consider using Rust.


Serverless Data Ingestion with Rust and AWS SES

In this post we will set up a simple, serverless data ingestion pipeline using Rust, AWS Lambda and AWS SES with Workmail.

We will handle multiple types of AWS events with one Lambda function, parse received emails with the mailparse crate, and send email with SES and the lettre crate.

The complete code for this example is available on GitHub here.