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On using Rust in VFX pipelines

Disclaimer: everything that follows is the result of what I think and is in no way connected or endorsed by my employer.

I have started my personal Rust journey a few years ago but I really didn't venture into trying to put it in production at $dayjob until a year or so ago.. and since then I have learned a few things that I think are worth sharing. Most of what follows should be read in the context of writing code supporting a Computer Graphics / Visual Effects pipeline (one of those places where the software is only relevant if it helps produce better pixels).

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Reusing an existing ssh-agent

For many years, I have been guilty of always recreating an ssh-agent instead of reusing the previous one. I know, it's an atrocity and a waste of CPU cycles and registers. It had to stop.

Every time I would try to use a ssh-key via ssh-add, I'd see the dreaded

Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.

message and I would just mindlessly run eval $(ssh-agent). With time, this would leave an army of ssh-agent processes behind my back..

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Choosing to work with Common Lisp in 2023

Image under Public Domain, but original credits go to Reddit user Anenome5

Tell me why

First of all, why would you still use a programming language first designed in 1960, using an implementation (SBCL) that has been around since at least 1984?

If you do the math and compare it to the pace of web development, it's like sticking with a tool that was written 126 JavaScript frameworks ago (according to this SO article). Imagine doing web development today using something that came before jquery!

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A handbook for the Doom Emacs initiate

AKA: how to use Doom Emacs as my main text editor for note-taking and software development.

But what is Doom Emacs ?

An Emacs framework for the stubborn martian hacker

The TL;DR is that Doom Emacs offers sane defaults for most stuff, and uses SPACE as your leader key. The killer feature for me is using the beautifully lisp-y Emacs ecosystem of packages together with the insanely practical vim keybindings (if you like being evil ).

NOTE: Everything I write is tested against my own config, which you can find in my dotfiles repo: https://github.com/vvzen/dotfiles

For more info on Doom Emacs itself, have a look at https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs

Buffer and File Navigation

  • SPACE + . -> Find a file to open in a new buffer

This^ uses dired, so you will be able to fuzzy match, etc.

  • SPACE + SPACE -> Find a file in the current project (also uses fuzzy find, but leverages projectile)

  • CTRL + x + d -> Edit the dired directory for the current buffer (and more)

  • SPACE + b + i -> Open a buffer listing all buffers (via ibuffer)

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My first SFF build with Arch linux

Preamble

After a decade of having macOS as my one and only OS for all of my home computing needs, I decided that it was time for me to tinker a bit with GNU/Linux too.

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From Jekyll to Zola

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Frozen in Time


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Scrambling to London

No, not every day was that sunny and that amazing. But that afternoon, it absolutely was.

Methods and morals (how and why)

On March of 2022, while the world is going even crazier than it has been for the past years, I decided to bring home (my 🇬🇧 one) my lovely new Benelli Leoncino Trail motorbike, which I had bought in Italy for a number of reasons(1). One the tiny detail though is that between my UK home and my Italian home there's almost 2k kms..

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A short essay on Automated Testing and why it's useful (in VFX too!)

An Extract of the Principia Mathematica, a colossal work by Whitehead and Russell, dedicated to formally proving that 1+1=2. If these guys dedicated a good chunk of their life to prove that 1+1=2, we can dedicate a few hours of our time to prove (test) that our code behaves as intended

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What I learned by solo bike-packing for 10 days around Cornwall

If there was something that I really missed since I moved to the UK, that was wild nature. The smell of grass in the morning, or a sunset without light pollution, or the silence of a forest. These kinds of things can't really be appreciated if your main focus is just to get on with your day to day job, and reach the end of the week without stressing too much.

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