codethoughts

Christian Kjær Laustsen — GitHub — LinkedIn

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Improved Turso (libsql) ergonomics in Rust
I recently started using Turso, which is a great database option for serverless as well as to keep costs low. Its pricing is more than competitive with something like AWS DynamoDB, which is quite interesting as a alternative to it.
One problem though, there's no support by any good ORMs or similar in the Rust ecosystem for Turso.
Instead, I was currently writing something like this, just to get a User out from the database via their session:

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Structuring your Engineering Organization
From a couple of founders, to a small team, to being a “small startup”, moving into scale-up territory, and finally transitioning beyond, there are many changes your organization will go through.
But what should you aim for as you grow and need to delegate your responsibilities and you transition from a couple of founders, into a company of 300 or more?
Throughout my career I’ve seen many structures at different scales, and have thought a lot about the ideal structure I would land on for a Engineering company that develops Products (e.g. a SaaS company).
I’ll warn you though: This will be opinionated, but I do believe that there is a strong reasoning behind the structure I’ve ended up at—let's dive in!

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Redirecting URLs with CloudFlare
I recently moved my blog from https://codetalk.io (now my commercial site) to https://codethoughts.io. This of course also meant, that everything linking to my old blog was now broken, which is not the best experience for any readers that I might have 😅
Initially I considered setting up rewrite rules somewhere for each individual post, but then thought of a much smarter way, using CloudFlare’s Redirect Rules, to instead redirect all direct links to posts and throw them to the new location on codethoughts.io.
The documentation for these rules are a bit sparse, so I thought I’d share how I did. First though, let’s set some context:
- The base domain changed from https://codetalk.io —> https://codethoughts.io
- All posts live under the /posts/ path on the domain
- All post slugs are identical in dates and names
- We no longer have a .html ending on the new blog (i.e. what previously might have been https://codetalk.io/posts/a-blog-post.html would now be https://codetalk.io/posts/a-blog-post/)
- We’re on the free CloudFlare plan, so there’s a limit to which expressions we can use
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Static SPAs: Exploration of Leptos, Dioxus, and Next.js
One of my absolute favorite methods of deploying Frontends is to pre-generate all routes statically, and then let each route load the dependencies they need for interactivity.
- Load times are fast
- The user only downloads what they need (great for slower or mobile networks)
- SEO is great in many cases, and okay in others
- It can all still be deployed in the most optimal way which is CDN + Static Assets
I particularly care a lot about infrastructure scalability, maintainability, robustness, and cost. SSR typically makes each of these significantly worse compared to simply serving static files. I also don’t believe mixing your API into your Frontend code (i.e. Server Actions) will do you any favors when you start scaling up your teams, but that’s a topic for another day.
In this post we'll explore how this can be setup and compare a couple of different frameworks. Let's start with the overall results before we dive into the details:
Framework SSG Support Hydration Support Assets Chunking
Next.js ✅ ✅ ✅ Chunk per page
Leptos ✅ ✅ ❌ One single WASM bundle*
Dioxus ✅** ✅ ❌ One single WASM bundle*
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How I structure work as a Solo Founder
This is for sure something that will keep evolving over time, but I got inspired by this Hacker News post to share in more detail how I organize myself and my work (you can see my short answer here).
The question posed is great, so let’s start from there:
When working with a team, I've found that Scrum-like short-term goals and organized task backlogs really help keep me focused and on track with the work I have to do. For solo development, however, I've never really found any approach that sticks and often end up getting sidetracked and losing track of my objectives.
So my question to all of you is, what tools and techniques have you used to ensure you stick to your objectives?
You could rephrase this slightly to: How do I run my own project management?
For most Engineers, this is not actually something they’ve needed to do often, especially if working in larger corporations. The people that have worked at Startups are a mixed bag, where some learn the value of structure, and others managed to get by without since the fast-paced environment changes things around all the time anyways.
I’ve personally landed in the camp of: Structure is valuable, even crucial, but it should never get in my way. Best of both worlds sorta.

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Mobile: A different way using Rust?
After having spent the better part of two months deep in the trenches of iOS development with Swift, I can comfortably say: Web Development simply is more mature.
Let’s just run over a few things I ran into that’s bad, broken, or made for a poor experience:
- A lot of issues with data handling in general
  - Turning iCloud on when using SwiftData will restrict core functionality such as the ability to have unique IDs on your data, meaning everyone now has to handle duplicates
  - iCloud (CloudKit) and data migrations don't work really work, it just won’t run it making data changes in your models quite the chore
  - SwiftData generally has very bad performance, both in reads, writes, and inserts
  - It’s quite hard to control memorization and rendering performance (e.g. @Query in your View)
- Swift itself is a bit of an eh language - it has many good parts and ergonomics, but also some weird design choices that make scaling codebases messy such as everything by default living in the global namespace and file names can’t clash
- SwiftUI is generally great, except when you want to do anything non-standard, in which case you’ll quickly feel the pain
- The feedback loop is slow: If you can run things in the Preview that’s the fastest, otherwise it’s a full Compile→Run→Simulator loop
- UI performance issues are very easy to sneak in, and very hard to track down
- Apple’s frameworks sure do have a lot of bugs and you’ll commonly see stuff being broken almost permanently
Admittedly, these might be trivial gripes for someone that has spent years in the Mobile ecosystem, but they certainly didn’t make me fall in love with it. More importantly, it wasn’t really providing a great user experience either.
….so what’s the alternative?
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Setting up UniFFI for iOS, Simulators, and watchOS
This is a part of the post Mobile: A different way using Rust?.
There are some great resources out there on UniFFI already such as this post, but it doesn’t cover watchOS, so let’s take a quick tour through what I’ve set up in the example repository https://github.com/Tehnix/template-mobile-wasm.
We've set up four crates:
- appy: Our Leptos App, Capacitor, and the XCode project
- capacitor-rs: Bridging code between the Capacitor JS library and our Rust code
- shared: Our shared code that we might use in appy, and also want to expose in Swift to use in our Widgets or watchOS App
- mobile: Where we will generate the Swift bindings from via UniFFI, reexporting everything from shared that’s made available to UniFFI via the macros
I won’t go over the details to get these to play nicely with Cargo and Workspaces, check out the repository for that. Let’s instead focus on a simplified version of what mobile does (the rest assumes you’re in the mobile/ directory).
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Rust on Mobile with WASM
Template project for building a Rust application that can be run on Web, iOS and Android using Leptos, Capacitor and UniFFI.
Compile to WASM via Rust and a framework such as Leptos, package WASM using Capacitor, interface with Capacitor Plugins via wasm-bindgen, support native Widgets using the generated Xcode project and Swift, use Rust code from Swift via UniFFI.

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Serverless Federated GraphQL
Comparison of Cold/Warm Start times of Federated GraphQL solutions for serverless, featuring a minimal build of Apollo Router built for Lambda via Amazon Linux 2, and comparison to other alternatives such as Cosmo, Mesh, and Apollo Gateway

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Serverless Rust / ...+ Graphql
A minimal template for deploying a Rust AWS Lambda function. Quickly get started with Serverless Rust + GraphQL + DynamoDB on AWS Lambda using AWS CDK for deployment

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SpaceNeovim / ...+ Layers
Spaceneovim is a Spacemacs inspired distribution for Neovim, which allows you to quickly get set up with sensible defaults in Neovim, and features an extensive layer system for easy extensibility

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Mobile Haskell
Example project for testing out Haskell on iOS, using custom work on a toolchain for running GHC on ARM, as well as providing a ready-to-use Xcode setup

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RF+1 App
Mobile app helping people meetup for concerts, developed for Roskilde Festival. Written using React Native for iOS and Android, and integrating with Facebook for OAuth

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HsCMS
HsCMS is a small blogging platform implemented using Haskell/Yesod. It allows you to easily setup and run your own blog, by taking care of the administration details and the back-end.

It comes with built-in markdown editing, automatic gist creation, disqus integration, and CloudFlare + Disqus analytics.

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TowerOfPower
A small fun Unity3D game in Pokémon style 2D graphics. The player starts in their home, and has to move from here around the map using either the arrow keys, the wasd keys or touch if on iPhone. There are certain areas that are blocked off, requiring either an NPC to be defeated before you can proceed, or, that you have a minimum of x reputation.

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Getting a hold of me

I can be found many places!

Hit me up on twitter at @codetalkio or Mastodon; tag me in an issue on GitHub with @Tehnix; or simply shoot me an email to contact AT codetalk DOT io

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Framework	SSG Support	Hydration Support	Assets Chunking
Next.js	✅	✅	✅ Chunk per page
Leptos	✅	✅	❌ One single WASM bundle*
Dioxus	✅**	✅	❌ One single WASM bundle*