I started working on GitChronicler mostly to learn how I could integrate AI into my workflow in a way that would actually spare me doing boring stuff, like writing the git commit message. The tool feeds a patch to a language model via the OpenRouter API and gets back a commit message that reflects what the code actually does — saving the mechanical step of describing changes that are already fully visible in the diff, while still leaving the developer in control of what gets committed.

I was looking for an Emacs mode that could help me to hack on Rust. The built-in rust-mode provides syntax highlighting and basic indentation, but for a language with a complex type system and borrow checker it is useful to have editor integration that can navigate to definitions, show type information, and offer completions. This post covers setting up racer-mode, which drives the racer code-completion engine to provide those features inside Emacs.

Rust-mode itself has not enough features to help me with a language I am not really proficient with yet.

I have been using Facebook for the last years to fill every dead time:waiting for the bus, ads on TV, compiling, etc.  The quality of the information coming from Facebook is inferior to any other social network, at least to my experience (it can be I follow/know the wrong people), though the part of the brain that controls procrastination seems addicted to this lower quality information and the chattering there.  Also, I don’t want to simply delete my Facebook account and move on, most of the people I know are present only there, neither I want to be more “asocial”.

Every programmer at some point gets in touch with the Brainfuck programming language and how surprising is that very few instructions are needed to have a Turing complete language, 6 is the case of Brainfuck (plus other 2 for I/O operations). The language operates on a tape of memory cells using only increment, decrement, pointer movement, and conditional loop instructions. Writing a GCC frontend for it turns out to be a manageable project, and the result is a good template for understanding how language frontends hook into the GCC middle-end and optimization passes.

git rebase is one of my favorite git commands. It allows to update a set of local patches against another git branch and also to rework, through the -i flag, some previous patches. A lesser-known capability is the –exec flag, which runs an arbitrary shell command after each patch is applied during the rebase. Combined with the -X theirs merge strategy to silently resolve conflicts, this makes it straightforward to apply mechanical transformations — such as a symbol rename — across an entire patch series without manual intervention.

Coming as a surprise, this year we have got 4 students to work full-time during the summer on wget. More than all the students who have ever worked for wget before during a Summer of Code! The projects span a broad range of improvements: HSTS and FTPS security hardening, TCP Fast Open and conditional GET for performance, HTTP/2 support on top of nghttp2, and an expanded FTP test suite. Each student is expected to keep their work rebased on the current development branch to ease eventual integration.

These are the steps to setup the current website in a Docker container. The setup uses docker-compose to declaratively describe a two-container application: a MySQL 5.5 database and a WordPress frontend. Docker links tie them together so that the web container can reach the database by hostname, without needing to hard-code any IP addresses or manage networking manually. A single docker-compose up command downloads the required images and starts both containers, with port 80 on the host forwarded into the WordPress container.