Six months of yak shaving a Zig web backend stack

A while back I wrote about Zio, my async I/O library for Zig. At the end of that post I said the next step was to update my NATS client and write an HTTP server. Well, one thing led to another, and I now have a whole web backend stack written entirely in Zig.

How I turned Zig into my favorite language to write network programs in

I’ve been watching the Zig language for a while now, given that it was created for writing audio software (low-level, no allocations, real time). I never paid too much attention though, it seemed a little weird to me and I didn’t see the real need. Then I saw a post from Andrew Kelley (creator of the language) on Hacker News, about how he reimplemented my Chromaprint algorithm in Zig, and that got me really interested.

My AI helpers, CodeRabbit and SourceGraph Cody

I’ve been an early adopter of AI coding tools. I’ve been using GitHub Copilot from the technical preview stages in 2021. It was mind-blowing to me. The interface was pretty minimal compared to what we have now, but even at the stage, it was revolutionizing the way I work. I’ve dreamed for a long time about programming without having to actually write all the code, and it was starting to become a reality. All in all, I was pretty happy with it.

Goodbye, Google Chrome

I’ve upgraded my laptop today, that included Google Chrome, and surprise, surprise, when it restarted, it started telling me that the uBlock Origin extension is no longer supported and will be disabled. I’m paying for YouTube Premium, but I still can’t live without ad blocker. It turns out you can just enable the extension again and it will keep working, but for how long. So I decide to switch. I’ve been using Chrome from the very early times, long before it was mainstream. The more popular Chrome was, the more hostile Google was. Now removing my ad blocker, that’s just saying they don’t want me to use their browser. That’s OK, now we have alternatives, even with ad blockers built in. My first choice would have been Opera, but unfortunately 1Password doesn’t support it, so I went to the next best option, Brave. So far, I’m pretty happy with it.

Msgpack serialization library for Zig

I’ve been playing with Zig over the last few weeks. The language had been on my radar for a long time, since it was originally developed for writing audio software, but I never paid too much attention to it. It seems that it’s becoming more popular, so I’ve decided to learn it and picked a small task of rewriting the AcoustID fingerprint index server in it. That is still in progress, but there is one side product that is almost ready, a library for handling msgpack serialization.

Chromaprint 1.4 released

A new version of Chromaprint has been released. This is a fairly big release I originally intended to call 2.0, but one key feature I was planning to include is not yet finished, so I decided to go with 1.4 instead.

mbdata 2016.07.17 released

I have released a new version of mbdata. It’s a small Python package for working with the MusicBrainz database using SQLAlchemy.

Chromaprint 1.3.2 released

A new version of Chromaprint has been released. This is a very small bug fix release fixing fpcalc crash on a corrupt file.

Chromaprint 1.3 released

A new version of Chromaprint has been released. This is another small release, there are no changes to the core functionality.