I do this for sites where I don't care at all about security. One minor tip, that will protect against automated attacks if the password is cracked, is to add part of the website name into the password (e.g "mystrongp4ss!lemworld") .
A human could easily crack it, but automated systems that replay the password on different sites would probably not bother to calculate the pattern.
I also use KeepassXC and Synthing together and I am very happy with this combination.
One tip that I have, if you are worried about the security of the database file being shared, is to get 2 Yubikeys and use these, along with a strong passphrase, to protect the database file.
At $work we write closed source Rust but we do not use Kellnr.
Instead we use a mono-repo, using a workspace, that contains most of our applications and libraries.
Our setup is mostly OK but needs some workarounds for problems we have hit:
- Slow
cargo clean && cargo build
, to speed this up we usesccache
. - Very slow Docker builds. To speed these up we use cargo chef.
- Slow CI/CD. To speed this up we use AWS instances as Github runners that we shutdown, but do not destroy, after use. This allows us to cache build dependencies for faster builds.
I am generally happy with our setup, but I am a fan of mono-repos. If it ever becomes to difficult to keep compiles times reasonable, I think that we would definitely look at Kellnr.
I enjoyed reading the Phoenix Project and learnt a lot from it. It is a classic for very good reasons.
There was another follow up book -- The DevOps Handbook that went into more detail about solutions to the problems raised in the Phoenix Project. I got a lot from the DevOps handbook but I found it quite a heavy read.
Years later I found a smaller, but super practical book, that covered much of the same subject matter -- Operations Anti-Patterns, Dev Ops Solutions. I recommend this Manning book after the Phoenix Project.
But then I haven't read the Unicorn Project yet, so that is a book for the list.
LOL, yes. Just in case it is of interest:
- ESP32-S3 is the chip, this family usually comes with CPU + Bluetooth + Wifi.
- Reverse TFT, this is a small display put on the other side of the circuit board from the chip.
- w.FL Antenna, this is the connector on the Wifi Antenna.
I like these small boards, they are tiny and I need a magnifying glass for soldering. Its mind blowing how these tiny boards are more powerful than mainframe computers filling a room, and supporting 20 users, used to be.
I think that Kreya is worth a mention:
- It has more complete OAuth2 support than Insomnia.
- Saves to human readable files.
- Usable free tier.
- Cheap Pro tier pricing.
If you deploy with Docker you need to attach to the external interface -- I bound to localhost in a Docker container once and its painful enough to debug that it is something I never forget.
I expect that upload_handle()
would need to change to 0.0.0.0
rather than axum to bind to localhost.
I bought my Fairphone for similar reasons to you.
I had a second hand mid-range Samsung for about 6 months and then the USB port got destroyed. I was unable to replace the USB port so the phone is useless.
I bought a Fairphone 5 thinking that, if anything similar happened, I would NOT need to replace the phone and would save money in the long term.
Kids not dying in cobalt mines is also a bonus: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893248/red-cobalt-congo-drc-mining-siddharth-kara
Despite using Tokio underneath, I think that Actix does NOT do work stealing and uses mostly separate threads:
Given this architecture, I think the article might inaccurate when it says that Actix handlers must be Send + Sync. See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/14cbe1u/why_does_actixwebs_handler_not_require_send/
Actix is a bit weird, but it has been around, and used in production, for a relatively long time.
Just to add to this point. I have been running a separate namespace for CI and it is possible to limit total CPU and memory use for each namespace. This saved me from having to run a VM. Everything (even junk) goes onto k8s isolated by separate namespaces.
If limits and namespaces like this are interesting to you, the k8s resources to read up on are ResourceQuota
and LimitRange
.
I am not sure if it is best practice, but this is what I do and it might provide some inspiration:
- Bootstrap from a private gitlab.com repository with a base ansible setup. Executed from a laptop.
- The bootstrap setups up k8s and installs a bare bones git repository docker container based on https://codeberg.org/al13nsc13nc3/gitsrv.
- Flux CD is installed into the bare bones git repository and k8s.
- Flux CD is used to install Forgejo and Woodpecker CI using the bare bones git repository as the gitops source of truth.
This has the advantage that Gitops and normal git repositories are separate. I think that a similar principle would work with docker compose instead of k8s.
The person that found this is a hero.
Whenever I see slightly weird behaviour, there is a temptation to just move on because there isn't enough time, running software is complicated, and there is something else I want to do. I will try to change my attitude in future in case it uncovers a backdoor like this -- it would be educational too.
I learnt something from this article, thanks.
I only found out yesterday that Rust has a Binary Heap in the standard library so the timing of this is perfect.
I looked at Tekton, but the complexity of doing simple things put me off. I have been running woodpecker which now has Kubernetes support.
Installing the Helm Chart for the Woodpecker agent gives K8s support with no special configuration needed. My needs are simple but I have been really impressed with how easy it has been.
For a fun comparison, a reasonable 1TB USB Stick costs slightly less than 1TB of AWS egress.
The manifest of my Kubernetes cluster is managed in a Git repository and is automatically deployed via a GitOps tool named Flux CD. When I push changes to the repository, such as adding a new application or upgrading Docker images, the deployment occurs within a few minutes.
This is the way.
Although I use Flux ImageUpdateAutomation
instead of Renovate Bot. Did you consider using Flux to do auto updates? Are there any downsides that made you choose Renovate Bot instead?
I installed K3s for some hobby projects over the weekend and, so far, I have been very impressed with it.
This got me thinking, that it could be a nice cheap alternative to setting up an EKS cluster on AWS -- something I found to be both expensive and painful for the availability that we needed.
Is anybody using K3s in production? Is it OK under load? How have upgrades and compatibility been?
I found the most interesting bit was this at the end:
- You can now specify a new
RestartPolicy: Always
configuration for an init container.- If you add that new config, you now have a sidecar container.
- A sidecar container starts before all ordinary containers (because it's an init container), and—this is the big part—it now terminates after all the ordinary containers all terminate.
- If for some reason your sidecar container dies while ordinary containers are running, it will be restarted automatically. (This is the "Always" bit.)
- Finally, unlike with normal init containers that each wait in turn to complete before the next starts, the other init containers do not wait for sidecar containers to complete before starting. Which is good, because they're not going to complete until much later.
We wrote a new, fast SAT solver for conda packages in Rust – a port of the libsolv C library.

There are only a few SAT solvers for Rust and this one looks well documented and will be well supported because it is part of Conda.
I don't know if it is ideal for a research paper, but we have been using semgrep with Rust. Semgrep allows you to write your own linter rules to enforce code standards.
I have found some basic rules on the internet (e.g no unwrap()
) but we have mostly had to write our own rules because there are only a few for Rust.
I think it would be a helpful project to write a Semgrep rule set that Rust developers could use. Maybe the "research" part would be looking at rulesets for other languages.
I don't think the survey was advertised? For me it popped up when I was writing something in the Rust Playground.