Will it MUD? — Overview of MUDs Throughout my career, one of the first things that I’ve done when encountering a new technology is ask myself whether this technology can be used to create a MUD, a multi-user dungeon (or dimension). MUDs, at least historically, are multi-user, online, text-based adventure games. It’s quite possible that there are…

My (mis)adventures with async, tokio, and async_std — Yesterday I was working on an S3 Provider to provide blob store capabilities to WebAssembly modules in the waSCC ecosystem. If you’re not familiar with the waSCC project, the idea is to take non-functional requirements (or cloud-native capabilities) and dynamically bind them to portable, secure WebAssembly modules that contain pure…

Since the first day I heard about Dark, I’ve been pestering its creators for access to the private beta. After the first round where they selected people based on a use case they wanted hardened (like choosing the most useful humans to be the first colonists to land on “New…

Do Fun Things with Big, Loud Worker-Bees — I admit it. I freely admit my guilt. I have neither excuses nor shame. I admit that I regularly buy programming books just so that I can curl up with them in a good chair and go through them from cover to cover, without ever opening a laptop. …

Collectively, our industry has a long and difficult history of re-inventing things as something that may still not solve the original problem. Those who adhere to the not invented here (NIH) philosophy are constantly re-building things as their own. …

The other day, Microsoft started making a bit of a splash on the tech news and social media feeds with the announcement of their new open source project called Dapr. I was immediately intrigued when I read Dapr’s logline: An event-driven, portable runtime for building microservices on cloud and edge. …

WebAssembly Procedure Calls — When I set out to build Waxosuit a few months ago, my knowledge of how data could flow between the WebAssembly guest⟷host boundary was fairly shallow, and limited to what little I knew of the wasm-bindgen project (a Rust crate that generates JS/Rust bindings for building browser-based apps). If you’re…

For the past several months, I’ve been working on an open source project called Waxosuit — a secure, cloud-native host runtime for WebAssembly modules. This project is written in Rust and takes advantage of a number of incredibly powerful Rust libraries and tools for manipulating and interpreting WebAssembly modules. Since…

A secure, cloud-native exosuit for WebAssembly — I’ve been developing back-end systems for a long time. Distributed systems; complicated, resilient back-end applications; and microservices has been my specialty and passion for as long as I can remember. I wrote a book on Cloud Native Go, a book on building Microservices with ASP.NET Core, and dozens of other…