I'll be attending RustConf in Montreal this week so I wanted to take a moment to describe how we're using Rust in SecureDrop. Historically SecureDrop has always been a primarily Python project accompanied by bash scripts and then HTML/CSS/JS for the web interface. Aaron Swartz's first commit to SecureDrop was…
I recently released 5.0.0 of my grr tool that makes working with Gerrit easier. It is an alternative to git-review; I personally think grr is more straightforward to use, but I also haven't used git-review since 2014 when I first got frustrated enough to create grr. I had let it…
I like Simon Willison's framing of using large language models (aka LLMs, aka "AI") to enable side quests of things you wouldn't normally do. Could I have done this without LLM assistance? Yes, but not nearly as quickly. And this was not a task on my critical path for the…
A number of tools hosted on Toolforge rely on the replicated MediaWiki databases, dubbed "Wiki Replicas". Every so often these servers have replication lag, which affects the data returned as well as the performance of the queries. And when this happens, users get confused and start reporting bugs that aren't…
tl;dr: You can now chat in #wikimedia-rust:matrix.org and reach folks on IRC Nearly a year ago, the official Libera.Chat <-> Matrix bridge was shut down. There's a lot that went wrong in the technical and social operation of the bridge that the Libera.Chat staff have helpfully documented, but from a…
If you visit my blog (most likely what you're reading now) and have JavaScript enabled, you should see a magnifying glass in the top right, next to the feed icon. Clicking it should open up a search box that lets you perform a very rudimentary full-text search of all of…
