If you’ve read this blog before, you may have noticed a cluster of posts from 2013-2016, followed by a suspiciously long silence until late 2025. The main reason for that gap was a job change in mid-2017, when I left Fivium and joined LMAX Exchange Group.

LMAX didn’t discourage blogging - quite the opposite. But the work demanded more focus, the commute was a lot longer, and life outside work also became busier. Something had to give, and unfortunately that something was writing. Lately I’ve been trying to get back into it, which has involved reflecting on some of the more interesting things I’ve worked on over the last decade.

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Rust is all the rage these days and it seems that barely a day goes by without a post on Hacker News extolling the virtues of Rust: blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety.

After what feels like decades of reading all this hype I figured it would be a good idea to jump aboard that hype train and try my own hand at making something with Rust that would take advantage of the features Rust gives you as a developer.

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In my previous post, Contributing to iText, I talked about my use of a great Java library called iText that lets you create and read PDF files. This is a post explaining the project, Adventurer, that I was working on which uses iText.

All the way back in December 2012 I backed a Kickstarter project by Ryan North for a choose your own adventure version of Hamlet called To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure. I pledged $35 to the project with the hopes of getting a signed physical book, some rad temporary tattoos as well as a DRM-free digital copy of the book. You can read more about the book over on Wikipedia.

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Recently I’ve been working on a coding project in my spare time where I stumbled upon a bug in an open source library I was using. As I’m a software developer who works on a few open source projects already I figured I should investigate and try to fix the problem myself and contribute back.

As some people can be wary of contributing to an established open source project I figured this post detailing what I went through may encourage others to take part too.

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