Lukas Werner / Posts / Quarterly No. 1

Quarterly No. 1

Wed Apr 16 2025

Lukas Werner

I thought it might be fun to start making reviews of what has happened in each quarter for looking back’s sake. The reason it is based on quarters is I wanted to kinda jab at how financial reports come out every quarter but also how often some publications actually put out an issue.

In this first issue I will cover the books I read, projects I worked on / built, events I participated in things that had a big impact on me in the quarter, and things that I am bullish and bearish on for the next quarter.

Unfortunately, because of the timing of Q2 starting at the same time as the beginning of the term I had to push this out ‘till now.

Books I Read

Skunk Works by Ben Rich

I’ve been hearing about this book for the last year almost constantly from Bryan Cantrill on the Oxide and Friends podcast. I finally got around to reading the book during this quarter. Once I started reading I just could not put the book down. I didn’t necessarily agree with all the military spending or military planning discussed in the book but, I really can appreciate the management and engineering that went into making those three amazing aircraft that were covered in this book. I wrote the following review in my notebook after I finished reading it:

Skunk Works – A great book covering the story of Ben Rich at the Skunk Works taking us from the mighty U2 spy-plane to the blazingly fast SR-71 and finally to the invisible F-117. Not only is this a book about those planes and making the military industrial complex look good, it also lays out the structure for groups within companies who want to break the frontier. A skunkworks division is called that for a very good reason, they completely broke the cutting edge over and over again.

Armada by Ernest Cline

This is probably the fourth or fifth time I’ve read this book now but this is the first time I read it on an iPod! After reviving my (not at all broken) modded iPod mini I decided to get audiobooks working before my tip to Colorado. After playing with ffmpeg commands to get my m4as to be recognized on the iPod. At this point this book is part comfy reading and part system stress test.

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

I finished this book right after the quarter, but because it was mainly read during the quarter I’m including it here. I really enjoyed the shorter essay format of this book. It made it a great read for between classes. With an overall focus on optimism while still being mindful of the many harms we humans have caused the earth during the anthropocene, it comes as incredibly genuine. I rate this book 4 out of 5.

Projects I Worked On

mark

This is a small project that is mainly just for me right now (with a hopeful broader release coming later this year). mark is a bookmark manager for people who enjoy the CLI and a way for me to experiment on local-first sync apps. While mark itself was not mainly built during this quarter some pretty great features on it were:

Pear Programming

This was so fun! This came out of BlasterHacks where myself and my teammates (Grant Lemons and Byron Sharman) didn’t want to build another web app instead we decided to build something command line based. Not only that, but we also figured that because of all the AI sponsorships that people would just be doing “ChatGPT”-wrappers. Instead of following that kind of hackathon thinking we went for a tmux-wrapper.

Pear Programming is essentially a way for people to pair program together without the need of a centralized server that everyone ssh’s into. The way it works is that we use peer to pear (p2p) networking through the libp2p library to get a “direct” connection to each of the viewers computers. The reason I say it is “direct” is because of some of the ambiguity of how hole-punching works. Because of how libp2p abstracts this we didn’t need to engross ourselves with the nitty-gritty.

Some smaller projects

Vanity short link site

This was a really fun project using Gleam where I really could use Gleam’s pattern matching to do my SQLite queries to check if the redirect existed or not:

case request.path_segments(req) {
  [] -> redirect(to: "https://lukaswerner.com")
  ["card"] -> vcard(Contact("Lukas", "Werner", "tele-phone-number"))
  [path] -> {
    case
      sqlight.query(
        "SELECT url FROM redirects WHERE name = ?",
        on: conn,
        with: [sqlight.text(path)],
        expecting: redirect_decoder,
      )
    {
      Error(_) -> not_found
      Ok([redir]) -> {
        redirect(to: redir.url)
      }
      Ok(_) -> not_found
    }
  }

  _ -> not_found
}

It was really fun to get most of the code working in about an evening. Polishing it up during one of my bus trips back to Portland with final refactor to use a SQLite database and add some CLI commands to control to links was also quite chill.

Beaver Papers

This is a smaller project that I started on because of my writing focused class, Native American Assimilation and Activism. During that class I started getting more into Typst. Browsing all the available packages I started to notice that many universities had pre-built templates for students to use for their papers and theses. After doing some quick internet sleuthing I found the template that OSU provides for their students and was frankly very disappointed how it looked. I took it upon myself to go make one myself. Several design iterations later I got to this:

A visual demo of how the beaver papers template looks like with overlaping pages

Overall I think it looks pretty good, almost official looking. The API I put together is decently extensible but it isn’t quite ready for publishing on Typst Universe. I hope to publish this within the end of the academic year.

Events I Participated

Shamrock Run 5K

On the finishing stretch of a 5K race, leaping in the air On the finishing stretch of a 5K race, leaping in the air

I really enjoyed this one! This was my first race since moving back to Oregon. I had been training for this race since I started attending class at OSU. Overall I did quite well placing 138th in the overall and 13th for my age bracket. My official was time 22:20 (a PR!). This exceeded my expectations of breaking a 23 minute 5K and was well past any of my previous training runs. My new goal is to break 22 minutes on my next 5K race at the end of May.

BlasterHacks / Colorado Trip

Byron and I go over a graphical diagram of how our app's architecture is going to work Byron and I go over a graphical diagram of how our app's architecture is going to work

Pardon the pun but this one was a blast! I flew in on the Friday of the event after my flight got moved back a few days. I already partially spoke about this event in the section about “Pear Programming.” Overall it was super nice to see many of my friends from Colorado even if it only for a few days. Regarding the hacking we (mainly me being over-confident) initially thought it wouldn’t be to hard because of go’s strong focus on abstraction via interfaces (io.Writer and io.Reader). The part that really took the longest was getting all the networking working in production. This was a midnight realization that our public IPv4 address was shared might screw with our TCP packets (and hole-punching attempts). After allocating a public IPv4 address everything suddenly worked!

Grant and I laughing over something I can't recall Grant and I laughing over something I can’t recall

Things That Made An Impact On Me

Simon Willison’s Blog

A great reference for all things AI and small project programming.

Oxide and Friends

I can not get enough of this podcast! The way these are able to go in depth with technical shows while still keeping me interested when they inevitably get off topic is really enjoyable. Plus the ability of Bryan Cantrill to get me to be interested in a technical book is astounding! This is where I got the book recommendations for “Skunk Works”, “The NeXT Big Thing”, and “Dealers of Lighting.” If you want to get a bunch of good book recommendations listen to their (quarterly?) “Books in the Box” series.

Some episodes (from this quarter) I recommend are:

The Ezra Klein Show

This podcast (and editorial columns) are incredible. The way that these conversations tend to focus on many underlying issues with the interviewer and interviewee getting pushed to each of their limits of their viewpoints are super fascinating. When I want to really understand both viewpoints or a topic well this is where I listen.

The Bullish and Bearish Things coming into Q2

Bulls

Bears