Welcome to nickb.dev, a blog by Nick Babcock! Below are my most recent articles. You can find the history of all my writings in the archive or just find out more about me.
Cloudflare Tunnel saved my home server when my apartment got a new ISP
Published on: My apartment building recently switched ISPs. After they finished installing, all the sites I host on my home server were no longer accessible. Cue the panic. My server relied on a publicly addressable IPv4 address, so how I can fix this?
Avoiding allocations in Rust to shrink Wasm modules
Published on: “Rust lacks a runtime, enabling small .wasm sizes because there is no extra bloat included like a garbage collector. You only pay (in code size) for the functions you actually use.” Easier said than done, as one has to watch out for allocations as they may significantly impact the Wasm module side.
Favoring SQL over Redis for an evergreen leaderboard
Published on: Redis is a natural choice for a database when showcasing a leaderboard, but sometimes introducing a database for this purpose can be excessive and unnecessarily complicate an application. Don’t overlook that SQL database you’re already employing.
DEFLATE yourself for faster Rust ZIPs
Published on:The Rust crate for handling ZIP files, zip-rs is quite flexible. The zip crate is compiled with builtin features to support deflated data (among other compression algorithms). This makes it incredibly easy to hit the ground running for reading and writing zips.
We can disable these builtin features. This may sound undesirable, but in fact, it is my new favorite way to integrate zip functionality into apps I write.d
Avoiding dynamic CSS-in-JS styles in React
Published on: The React working group have given a lukewarm signal to dynamic CSS-in-JS libraries. They advocate for static CSS extraction with dynamic styling relegated to inline styles. I convert a component from CSS-in-JS to CSS modules and inline styles, and give a positive outlook for adding Tailwind to the mix.
The footgun with Docker Compose shared configurations
Published on: Docker Compose has a nice feature where several Compose files can be seamlessly fashioned together and allow for configuration reuse across environments. There is, however, counterintuitive behavior that can lead one to accidentally overwrite remote container images. Since I lost several hours to this, I figured I’d write about it to sear the behavior into my memory.
The subjective nature of JS libraries exposing an off the main thread API
Published on: JavaScript environments like node.js and the browser have a main thread that runs basically everything. Exhausting the main thread can cause bad user experiences. If long-running or computationally intense functions on the main thread are bad, whose responsibility is it to offload the function: the developer of the application or the library? Sometimes the answer isn’t simple.
Recommendations when publishing a Wasm library
Published on: A set of recommendations to make publishing a Javascript library that uses Wasm internally easier for application developers. There are a significant number of use cases and edge cases that we’ll code around as we try and cater to several types of developers: from those who may not know or care about Wasm and the broader JS ecosystem, to more experienced developers who want to optimize every last drop.