Benjamin Bouvier

Another very self-centered update post about me merging my personal and work blogs, and some fun facts about the changes in URLs this caused.

The two or three regular visitors of this blog (hi friends!) might have noticed I’ve changed the design, as of this year. I’ve actually moved from using the Pelican static blog generator to using Zola. This article shows the continuous integration I’ve set up to automatically build and push content to my server, Real Fast™.

Lately, I’ve had to find a hosting server to replace the server we rented for delire.party, our self-hosting collective of friends. Indeed, OVH decided, with no extra explanations, to decomission our Kimsufi server at the end of the year, and to have us pay a few euros more per month until then. This kind of practices irritates me, so I’ve decided to pull out the plug (metaphorically speaking — the OVH server will still be online for the time of the migration) and have our next server live at Hetzner.

cargo-machete is a new Cargo tool that detects unused dependencies in Rust projects, in a fast (yet imprecise) way. As of today you can install it with cargo install cargo-machete and then run it with cargo machete from any folder that contains a workspace or crate, to find if you have potentially unused dependencies. Beware, it can report a few false positives!

Cranelift is a code generator written in the Rust programming language that aims to be a fast code generator, which outputs machine code that runs at reasonable speeds.

In this post I reflect on my personal history of writing chat bots, and then present a panel of features that the bot has, some user-facing ones, some others that embody what I esteem to be a sane, well-behaved Matrix bot.

Since I’ve been working on a Github project for a while now, I thought now would be a good time to gather ways to make it easier to work with Github pull requests (PRs). In particular, it’s easy to drown yourself in the incoming flow of Github emails.

Since this is the end of the first half-year, I think it is a good time to reflect and show some work I’ve been doing over the last few months, apart from the regular batch of random issues, security bugs, reviews and the fixing of 24 bugs found by our fuzzers.

In December 2015, I’ve worked on reducing startup time of asm.js programs in Firefox by making compilation more parallel. As our JavaScript engine, Spidermonkey, uses the same compilation pipeline for both asm.js and WebAssembly, this also benefitted WebAssembly compilation. Now is a good time to talk about what it meant, how it got achieved and what are the next ideas to make it even faster.

I’ve stumbled across espadrine’s blog post about his accomplishments in 2014 and found it was a really good idea. It matters a lot to acknowledge your own accomplishments, without being overly proud about them, just to realize you’re not an impostor, and that you bring value to your company and deserve your current position (yes, there probably will be more about the so-called impostor syndrome on this blog).