Programming on nsf.name

Nix(OS) Considered Harmful

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 11:19:06 -0400

I really want to like Nix and NixOS. There are many genuinely amazing and intelligent ideas within the project, but every time I stop and consider recommending it to someone, I feel like I can’t give a positive endorsement of the project, even though the technology of Nix(OS) is incredible, and I hope someone better builds upon it someday.

What is Nix(OS)?

Many have never heard about this project, so a bit of explanation might not be remiss. Nix’s one sentence definition, as described by the main website¹:

Copycat: iOS Copyparty Client

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:15:02 -0600

Copyparty is a genuinely great file server that I like using, and it’s played an important role in many smaller projects I’ve done throughout the year when something like scp or AirDrop just won’t do. The one area where it’s still really lacking is in user-friendly GUI and a native experience on mobile: while there is a pile of iOS shortcuts that allow for uploading to a copyparty server (and a small Android app that does roughly the same thing), it’s nothing quite like a full native app in terms of speed and ease of use.

Lufsa: Sticky Note Images

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 19:21:43 -0600

After previous projects with SwiftUI, I became curious as to what the limits of the framework are, and how different the development experience is between macOS and iOS apps. To push those limits, I aimed to recreate a somewhat weirder application: xteddy.

Why `xteddy`?

xteddy is a X11 application written by Professor Stefan Gustavson which originally did exactly one thing: draw a non-rectangular, floating window to the screen containing just the bundled xteddy image, and implement some basic handlers to kill and open it appropriately. However, later versions released in 1997 onwards allow you to load any arbitrary .xbm (X Bitmap), and in the Debian Linux port, .png files. This effectively made it a simple sticky note application but for images.

Learning Rust & Project Ideas

Thu, 21 May 2026 11:44:30 -0600

Recently I finished taking CS237, a class all about writing in C and x86 assembly, so I thought it would be a natural try to work on Rustlings at the same time to see if the hype around Rust really lived up to what everyone else was saying about it. After finishing Rustlings, I can confidently say that Rust is an extremely useful language that I’m glad I spent the time to learn and working on it has given me the confidence to approach some ideas I probably wouldn’t have ever considered otherwise.

Rewriting WSO Mobile in Swift

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:59:16 -0500

At Williams College, most student technological services run through an organization called WSO¹, for common tasks like checking the course calendar, dining hall menus, rating professors, trading textbooks, and more. Since the college doesn’t provide its own app, that means our app is the standard app for the ~2,000 students who are active students.

Around December of 2025, I began to realize that we should aspire to do better than our current trainwreck of an app. The last time that WSO’s aging mobile app was rewritten before the rewrite that I am about to discuss here was all the way back in 2016, meaning the current mobile app was made of nearly a decade of unmaintained trash. I can’t even begin to explain how bad this actually was²: