Gonçalo Valério

Tag: rust

  • Cleaning my follow list using “jacanaoesta”

    Last year we saw the rise of the Fediverse. Mostly because of a series of external events, that ended up pushing many people to try other alternatives to their centralized platform of choice.

    Mastodon was clearly the software component that got most attention and has been under the spotlight in the last few months. It wasn’t launched last year, in fact, mastodon instances (servers) have been online since 2016, managed by its developers and other enthusiasts.

    I’ve been running my own instance since 2017 and since then, I’ve seen people come and gone. I started following many of them, but some no longer are active. This brings us to the real topic of this post.

    Since I couldn’t find a place in the Mastodon interface that would allow me to check which users I follow are inactive, I decided to build a small tool for that. It also served as a nice exercise to put my rust skills into practice (a language that I’m trying to slowly learn during my spare time).

    The user just needs to specify the instance and API key, plus the number of days for an account to be considered inactive if the default (180 days) is not reasonable. Then the tools will print all the accounts you follow that fit that criteria. 

    Find people that no longer are active in your Mastodon follow list.

Usage: jacanaoesta [OPTIONS] <instance>

Arguments:
  <instance>

Options:
  -k, --api-key      Ask for API key
  -d, --days <days>  Days since last status to consider inactive [default: 180]
  -h, --help         Print help information
  -V, --version      Print version information

    And this is an example of the expected output:

    Paste API Key here:
Found 171 users. Checking...
veracrypt (https://mastodon.social/@veracrypt) seems to be inactive
...
fsf (https://status.fsf.org/fsf) seems to be inactive
38 of them seem to be inactive for at least 180 days

    Without the -k option, the program tries to grab the API key from the environment variables instead of asking the user for it.

    Problem solved. If you want or need to give it a try, the code and binaries can be found here: https://github.com/dethos/jacanaoesta

    Note: After publishing this tool, someone brought to my attention that Mastodon does indeed have a similar functionality in its interface. The difference being it only considers accounts that don’t publish a status for 1 month as inactive (it’s not configurable).

    You can find it in “Preferences → Follows and Followers → Account Activity → Dormant”

    Screenshot of where to find the "dormant" functionality.

  • Rust examples and exercises

    Learning to program in Rust is as easy like other languages out there, because it ends up having different constrains and new concepts that you will have to go through, in the beginning everybody fights the compiler at least a little bit.

    I started this journey a while ago, however I’ve been progressing slowly just dedicating some time once in a while when I don’t anything else to do.

    I did what many recommendations on the internet tell you to do, start by reading the official book, that is in fact pretty good. But after reading one or two chapters, we need to practice and play with the language to have a feel of it and explore the new concepts you had just learned.

    So in this small post I just want to share two open resources that can be used while you read the book to practice what you have just learned.

    The first one is a website with examples you can modify and execute live in the browser called Rust by Example.

    The second is an official rust project that will put your knowledge up to a test called Rustlings.

    You can use it like the above video or with rustlings watch that stop and reload each exercise until you solve it.

    This is it, I hope they end being helpful to someone else as well.