Alexey's blog

Lessons learned from building a deadlift platform

3 minute read Published: 2020-11-01

After moving into a house with a garage I've decided to fulfill my goal of having a home gym. One of the pieces of equipment I needed for that was a deadlifting platform. After looking around online for a bit I've decided to follow this guide by Alan Thrall and build my own. These are the lessons I learned from completing this project. Note that some or all of these might seem obvious to you if you build things like that regularly, but for me, it was all new.

A webapp skeleton with Rust, Rocket, and Diesel

11 minute read Published: 2018-09-17

This is a condensed walkthrough of building a skeleton Rust web app using Rocket, Diesel and PostgreSQL heavily based on a more thorough series of blog posts called "Making a simple blog with Rust" and updated to incorporate the recent API changes as well as using a different database schema and a few extra tools.

Getting involved in open source

3 minute read Published: 2017-07-27

I've been asked about getting involved in open source projects a couple of times before, so I decided to write up all the advice on this topic I have.

Not that long ago I too was having problems finding a project and sending my first PR. So here's how I would approach it today.

Ballast, a library for talking to Shipwire

3 minute read Published: 2017-01-17

After finishing the wonderful Haskellbook, the first "real world" project I've started writing is a Haskell API wrapper for Shipwire called Ballast. While doing that, I was following the general architecture of dmjio's Stripe API wrapper. In this post I will try to describe an overview of how both the stripe library and Ballast are built.

Fixing bold font colors in termite

1 minute read Published: 2016-02-29

Recently I've switched to termite from suckless st. Mostly because of the problem I was having with the glyph rendering in st. I still like st more than urxvt, but I decided it's time to look for something better.