It’s been a while since I’ve had the opportunity to sit down and write a nicely thought out blog post, but in the complete absence of any rhythm in recent postings I figured I’d write down some thoughts about the last 2 weeks.

I’ve been making slow (mostly due to time commitments), but good progress on the USB barcode scanner project I’ve been hacking on for Noisebridge. One of the frustrations in choosing Rust for this project was the lack of API stability in pre-1.0.0 Rust. This manifested itself in many ways, but mostly it was documentation being out of date and confusing given breaking API changes, or refactors where functionality that was previously in “core” being moved out into their own external crates.

That said, Rust recently went 1.0.0, and with the new stability and renewed energy going into documentation I’m even more excited to continue hacking on things using it. I’ve found each problem on the way with this project interesting enough to get lost in the rabbit hole of documentation to see what the Rust way is to do things, which has provide for a very enjoyable learning experience.

In Noisebridge news, the past two weekends have been very busy for the community, first with the Stupid Shit No-One Needs and Useless Technology Hackathon which was a great success, followed by Maker Faire this week. The hackathon was a 2 day event taking place at multiple venues in the Bay Area, at Noisebridge, Sudoroom and Mozilla. I arrived midway through Saturday to find the space packed with people having fun making things, showing them off to others and getting a few laughs. I lost count of how many people came through Noisebridge in the hours I was there. It struck me that it was a particularly diverse crowd for such an event, and I was delighted to see Noisebridge take part in it. I’m hopeful something like it will happen again in the near future.

I have a bunch of projects taking my time at the moment, some of which I’m going to be very excited to write about when they’re a bit more solidified and presentable, everything ranging from SDR hacks, to events and conferences, with Noisebridge infrastructure mixed in the lot. I’m anticipating that I’ll have no shortage of things to write about :)