The escape hatch that turned out to be french doors
I wanted an FFmpeg that couldn't touch my disk. Building the interface to get one accidentally produced something considerably more useful.
Categories
133 pages
Pioneering
Notes from active builds: the design decisions, war stories and how-it-works of whatever I'm making right now.
A progress bar without a CLI to scrape
Every FFmpeg progress bar I've seen scrapes the CLI's stderr. afmpeg has no CLI to scrape, so progress had to become part of the API instead.
The most tempting corpus in any repository
The issue tracker is full of answers, which is exactly why my support bot isn't allowed to quote it. An issue can point at the docs, but it never gets to be the answer.
The repo that downloaded 170 gigabytes
An hour to compile and 170GB of artefacts to clean up afterwards. Rust has a built-in answer to that, and I only used half of it.
A terrible lead to an AI junior
I'd built this exact thing by hand, years ago, pixel perfect. So why was I sitting here shouting at a screen while a machine got it wrong three times?
A client you can still use when you configured it wrong
Go says a constructor either works or it doesn't. That contract stops making sense the moment a client has a dozen optional parts, so I broke it on purpose.
A format per module, not a fatter config core
Viper reads a dozen extensions. Mine reads one, and the other formats live somewhere else entirely. Here's what that bought, measured rather than asserted.
The writer I added, and the Viper I deleted by accident
I set out to add a config writer and keep Viper. I ended up keeping the writer and deleting Viper, and I didn't notice until it was already gone.
Config is a border, not a chain
I built a boundary so I wouldn't have to move my config package. Then I moved it anyway, and the boundary is the only reason that didn't hurt.
Posting unifies, tokens don't
One interface posts a reel to four platforms cleanly. Their OAuth token handling refused to unify at all, which is why I built all four first.
