Working with the garage door up

May 22, 2021

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

A month or so ago I read a blog post about working with the garage door up - that sharing your journey toward a finished product is every bit as powerful and useful as sharing the end products themselves. It has been a long, long time since I've done anything like that, especially on this site, so I figure now would be a great time to talk about what I've been up to for the last... three? four? years.

First off, this site itself. I've been interested in learning Rust for the last year, and in the process of learning Rust I came across Zola. For all the years this site has existed, it has been hand-written HTML by me. No static site generators, no CMSes, just copying and pasting HTML templates and manually updating links. I knew about SSGs, of course, but I never found one that made writing posts or book chapters easier. Zola, however, has had pretty much everything I am looking for: great Markdown support, built-in syntax highlighting, and WordPress-style "shortcodes" that let you move your commonly-used HTML patterns out into functions that can be called in your Markdown. It's not perfect, of course; I'm still trying to replicate the line-numbering syntax highlighting of PrismJS. But it's just so very nice that I've moved all of my websites (famicom.party, the Book, and this blog) over to it.

A large part of my interest in Rust came from my work on NES Lightbox. I wrote that app in Electron, and it works well but is quite bloated for what it does (several hundred megabytes!). I spent a lot of time investigating alternative GUI frameworks, including Qt (C++), PyQt (Python), gtkrs (Rust), Relm (Rust), and Druid (Rust), but none of them really seemed to stick for me. Then I started working with Tauri and fell in love with it. Tauri is basically "Electron, but in Rust, and using the OS' built-in browser framework." The actual app logic is still in HTML/CSS/JavaScript, but the backend that runs your web app and connects with the operating system (to show menus, open files, etc.) is Rust. There's a nice JavaScript API that lets you call in to the Rust backend without having to write much Rust yourself. The whole thing is a joy to use.

For the app layer itself, I've been looking to write something more expansive than NES Lightbox. My Tauri app is an attempt at a full workbench of NES graphics tools, with the ability to create, save, and mix-and-match things like palettes, sets of tiles, and more. I'm building out this app with Svelte, a front-end framework I had been meaning to try out. I've written a fair bit of React code, and I tried (and disliked) Vue.⊕ I'm sure that Vue has improved since I last used it - it always seemed like it was trying to keep up to date with whatever was new in React - but I really just wanted to try something different. Maybe I'll pick up Vue again someday and give it another try. There is a Vue plugin for Tauri which I'm sure makes that integration easier. Svelte seems like the best of both worlds, with a very Vue-like single file component setup, but a React Hooks-style approach to things like "stores" (a kind of flux pattern). Setup was super-easy, and it's helped me make good (or at least what seem like good) architecture choices.

What about the Book? After converting all the content to Markdown (and cleaning up a few things along the way), I'm starting to work on a new chapter on sprite movement. That will require a discussion of zero-page RAM in the NES, as well as another look at NMI handlers and how they work. I can't say when it will be ready (and my predictions in the past have been terrible), but I am working on it.

Thanks for reading! I'll be posting regular updates like this one in the weeks to come. You can now subscribe to an RSS feed of updates from across all Famicom Party sites, if that's something you're interested in.