I have been watching a tutorial on GraphQL recently (YouTube link) where the lecturer uses MongoDB for persistent storage. He instructs viewers to sign up for a service that hosts a database, but I wanted to run a local instance on my machine instead. MongoDB is not available in the Void repos, but fortunately it is available in the Guix repos. However, running the Mongo deamon requires a little tweak first.
I have recently been getting into Elixir, and one nice feature it has is the pipe operator. It allows us to express a pipeline of function through which an object will be dragged. This got me thinking: with how flexible Lua is, would it be possible to add something similar to Lua as well?
Javascript has a spreading operator which lets us splice the contents of an object or array into another object or array. This makes it very easy to create an object based on another object and override or add entries. Since Lua and Javascript are quite similar, wouldn’t it be nice to have this operator in Lua as well? Lua is a minimal language, so adding a new operator seems unlikely, but Lua is also very flexible, and we can add a spreading function instead.
LuaRocks is a community-driven package manager for the Lua programming language. LuaRocks packages can be installed globally or in the user’s home directory, but sadly LuaRocks does not follow the XDG Base Directory specification. However, with a few lines of Lua code we can fix this shortcoming partially at least.
The war on dotfiles continues, this time with SBCL. Let’s see how we can make it comply with the XDG Base Directory specification.
GNU Bash does not comply with the XDG Base Directory specification, it uses the classical dotfiles approach where it just dumps all its files into the home directory. It does not even have the courtesy of putting all its files in one common ~/.bash directory. Fortunately we can coerce Bash into compliance with a bit of effort.
I use GNU Guix as a secondary package manager on my system. Previously I have been running Kubuntu, which uses systemd as its init system, but I have since switched to Void, which uses runit. Guix comes with services for systemd and Upstart included, but not for runit. Let’s find out how to create a runit service from scratch.
There are two types of people: those who make backups and those who will experience a system breakdown. Fortunately I was in the former category, but it was still a very tedious and stressful experience. Every problem is also an opportunity to grow and throw off dead weight, so I used the opportunity to upgrade the hardware and switch my operating system.
In my previous blog post I presented how I had come up with an embedded domain-specific language for creating web pages in my custom static site generator. I also mentioned the concept of “templates” in passing. Of course it was only logical to follow the page DSL up with a custom template DSL to smooth over the code duplication and pattern repetition.
I got bitten by the Lisp bug recently again, and so I decided to clean up an ugly wart in my static site generator which I use for generating the Workshop. The goal was to create an embedded domain-specific language (DSL) for defining web pages.