ntietz.com: "Compressing" with pi, and my book
Hello and happy Friday! This month I kept busy with a few blog posts and some personal project work. I also, uh, I guess I published a book! And I still have a day job.
First up are blog updates, then book information, then personal projects. As always, I would love to hear from you! If you have any thoughts, hit reply and it'll come to my inbox (my direct email is also on my website).
Blog updates
Here are the posts from this month. I released a lot of writing this month! I hope you enjoy some of these.
- Building a demo of the Bleichenbacher RSA attack in Rust: Last month I sent out the demo, and here's the full post on how I built it. You can go play with a visualization of this famed attack!
- Work on tasks, not stories: I'm a little bit passionate about project management, and here's a hot take. The title says it, but the post backs it up.
- Achieving awful compression with digits of pi: A friend and I ported a pi-calculation algorithm from its original C to Rust, and then I wrote "compression" on top of it. This one did come out on Pi Day, and is a fun one!
- Procrastinating on my side project by torturing databases: Everyone needs some more data-driven decisions in their life. This talks about how I picked a database for my project management software, Pique. (More on that in projects, below.)
- When to use cute names or descriptive names: Naming things is a hard problem, and there are whole books about it. This talks about one particular axis of decision, whimsy vs. being a boring fuddy-duddy. It includes some heuristics for making this decision on your own projects!
- Start to finish on self-publishing a technical book: I, uh, I published a book? I published a book. This post talks about the tech I used to make it, the end-to-end process, and if you want, it includes links to buy it. All proceeds go to charity.
- Decaf is good, actually: For April Cools, I wrote something out of my usual and shared one of my passions, coffee. Decaf is maligned and the reputation is unfair. Here's why you should consider drinking it!
The book
It still feels odd to say, but I did (self-)publish a book this month. There's the blog post about it. You can check it out on May 11 Publishing's website, with direct links to purchase.
Please consider buying a copy! It encourages me to keep writing, showing me that people value what I do. And the money from sales all goes to benefit a charitable cause.
It's listed for $20, but subscribers can buy it at a discount for $10 (just about the cost of printing). If you can afford the full price, please do that, as the entire difference after tax is donated!
Personal projects
I have a few projects going on right now.
First is Heart, the programming language I'm working on. It's in very early phases of playing around with syntax ideas, and I'd like to at least get the grammar and a tokenizer written this month. I may start working on the bytecode spec and runtime, as well, since I'm pretty excited for those. If you have any syntax you particularly love in a programming language, or particularly loathe, please let me know!
And the other is Pique, my project management web app. It's in very early phases, doesn't do anything real yet. You can log in and out. The goal is to capture all my issue tracking and basic Markdown documents for personal projects in one place, similar to Basecamp. I want it to be useful to me, and hopefully others will find it useful, too. It's source-available but not open-source (I haven't decided if it will be, so keeping my options open).
This week the Candidates Tournament begins, which selects the challenger for the World Chess Championship 2024. I've worked on a chess database in the past and I expect this event will make me pull that project off the shelf!
Whew, that's a lot. Thank you for reading and subscribing, and please share my posts and this newsletter with someone who might enjoy it. I hope you have a great month!
❤️ Nicole