Amos Wenger
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2025 Recap: so many projects
I’ve been working on so many projects in 2025, I thought it was important for me to make a recap, if only just to clear my head. There are many, many, many things to go through and we don’t have a sponsor today, so I’m gonna start right away with facet! facet facet is a project that I started working…
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Introducing arborium, a tree-sitter distribution
About two weeks ago I entered a discussion with the docs.rs team about, basically, why we have to look at this: When we could be looking at this: And of course, as always, there are reasons why things are the way they are. In an effort to understand those reasons, I opened a GitHub issue which resulted…
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Does Dioxus spark joy?
Note: this article is adapted from a presentation I gave at a Rust Paris Meetup — that’s why it sounds a little different than usual. Enjoy! Good evening! Tonight, I will attempt to answer the question: Does Dioxus spark joy? Or at the very least, whimsy. What’s Dioxus, you ask? It is first and foremost…
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Engineering a Rust optimization quiz
There are several Rust quizzes online, including one that’s literally called the “Unfair Rust Quiz” at https://this.quiz.is.fckn.gay/, but when I was given the opportunity to record an episode of the Self-Directed Research podcast live on the main stage of EuroRust 2025, I thought I’d come up with something…
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Making our own spectrogram
A couple months ago I made a loudness meter and went way too in-depth into how humans have measured loudness over time. Today we’re looking at a spectrogram visualization I made, which is a lot more entertaining! We’re going to talk about how to extract frequencies from sound waves, but also how my spectrogram…
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crates.io phishing attempt
Earlier this week, an npm supply chain attack. It’s turn for crates.io, the main public repository for Rust crates (packages). The phishing e-mail looks like this: Andrew Gallant on BlueSky And it leads to a GitHub login page that looks like this: Barre on GitHub Several maintainers received it — the…
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color npm package compromised
On September 8 2025, around 13:00 UTC, someone compromised Josh Junon’s npm account (qix) and started publishing backdoored versions of his package. Someone noticed and let Josh know: Charlie Eriksen on BlueSky Josh confirmed he’d gotten pwned by a fake 2FA (two-factor authentication) reset e-mail: Josh…
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The science of loudness
My watch has a “Noise” app: it shows dB, for decibels. Your browser does not support the video tag.My amp has a volume knob, which also shows decibels, although.. negative ones, this time. Your browser does not support the video tag.And finally, my video editing software has a ton of meters — which are…
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Summer fasterthanlime update
There are news! Cool Bear's hot tip TL;DR: If you’re a patron or sponsor, check your Profile page to get detailed explainers of every perk. You’ll need to log in. Duh. Here are all the changes I’m implementing, summarized as a table: BeforeAfter📚 Articles remain exclusive for 6 monthsEarly access (couple…
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All color is best-effort
I do not come to you with answers today, but rather some observations and a lot of questions. The weird glitch Recently I was editing some video and I noticed this: Not what the finger is pointing at — the dots. Here are the separate layers this image is made up of: the background is a stock image I’ve…
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Introducing facet: Reflection for Rust
I have long been at war against Rust compile times. Part of the solution for me was to buy my way into Apple Silicon dreamland, where builds are, like… faster. I remember every time I SSH into an x86_64 server, even the nice 64-core ones. And another part was, of course, to get dirty with Rust itself…
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The virtue of unsynn
Addressing the rumors There have been rumors going around, in the Reddit thread for facet, my take on reflection in Rust, which happened a bit too early, but here we are, cat’s out of the bag, let’s talk about it! Rumors that I, podcaster/youtuber fasterthanlime, want to kill serde, serialization / deserialization…
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Open sourcing the home CMS
I’ve been bragging about my website software for years! For… whew, it’s been 5 years! I didn't want to make a CMS! I did it out of spite! I’ve been teasing folks about the cool things I did from the beginning — here are all the articles and series I’ve written that mention it: 2020: A new website 2021…
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The promise of Rust
The part that makes Rust scary is the part that makes it unique. And it’s also what I miss in other programming languages — let me explain! Rust syntax starts simple. This function prints a number: fn show(n: i64) { println!("n = {n}"); } And this program calls that function — it looks like any C-family…
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That health is mental
Disclaimer: Trigger warning: depression, talk of suicide. It’s been a while since I wrote a mental health piece — but I think it’s important to occasionally stop, take a breather, and think about how we feel. So. deep breath I’m okay, I think? Just a little restless. A bit of personal context For those…
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More devops than I bargained for
Background I recently had a bit of impromptu disaster recovery, and it gave me a hunger for more! More downtime! More kubernetes manifest! More DNS! Ahhhh! The plan was really simple. I love dedicated Hetzner servers with all my heart but they are not very fungible. You have to wait entire minutes for…
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Impromptu disaster recovery
Background im-promp-tu (im-ˈpräm(p)-(ˌ)tü) made, done, or formed on or as if on the spur of the moment: improvised composed or uttered without previous preparation: extemporaneous Merriam-Webster On March 18th, 2025, I thought I would look into self-hosted project management solutions — something kanban…
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The case for sans-io
The most popular option to decompress ZIP files from the Rust programming language is a crate simply named zip — At the time of this writing, it has 48 million downloads. It’s fully-featured, supporting various compression methods, encryption, and even supports writing zip files. However, that’s not…
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Catching up with async Rust
In December 2023, a minor miracle happened: async fn in traits shipped. As of Rust 1.39, we already had free-standing async functions: pub async fn read_hosts() -> eyre::ResultVecu8>> { // etc. } …and async functions in impl blocks: impl HostReader { pub async fn read_hosts(&self) -> eyre::ResultVecu8…
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Highlighted code in slides
I have obsessed about this long enough, I think it’s only fair I (and you!) get some content out of it. When I started writing this article, I was working on my P99 CONF slides. Those slides happen to include some bits of code. And because I’m a perfectionist, I would like this code to be syntax highlighted…
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ktls now under the rustls org
What’s a ktls I started work on ktls and ktls-sys, a pair of crates exposing Kernel TLS offload to Rust, about two years ago. kTLS lets the kernel (and, in turn, any network interface that supports it) take care of encryption, framing, etc., for the entire duration of a TLS connection… as soon as you…
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State of the fasterthanlime 2024
It’s time for some personal and professional news! TL;DR: I started a podcast with James, I’m stable on antidepressants, I’m giving a P99 CONF about my Rust/io_uring/HTTP work, I’m trying on “they/them” as pronouns, I’m open-sourcing merde_json, rubicon and others, I got a divorce in 2023, I found a…
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Face cams: the missing guide
I try to avoid doing “meta” / “behind the scenes” stuff, because I usually feel like it has to be “earned”. How many YouTube channels are channels about making YouTube videos? Too many. Regardless, because I’ve had the opportunity to make my own mistakes now for a few years (I started doing the video…
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Just paying Figma $15/month because nothing else fucking works
My family wasn’t poor by any stretch of the imagination, but I was raised to avoid spending money whenever possible. I was also taught “it’s a poor craftsman that blames their tools”, which apparently means “take responsibility for your fuckups”, but, to young-me, definitely sounded more like “you don’t…
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Cracking Electron apps open
I use the draw.io desktop app to make diagrams for my website. I run it on an actual desktop, like Windows or macOS, but the asset pipeline that converts .drawio files, to .pdf, to .svg, and then to .svg again (but smaller) runs on Linux. So I have a Rust program somewhere that opens headless chromium…
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