As a pseudo-Christmas present, a dear friend of mine gave me my first mechanical keyboard. Naturally, I’m now looking for all sorts of things to type, just so I can hear the clicky-clacky sounds that I find so satisfying. If you’re wondering, the box says “60% Anne” and that the switches are brown. I don’t really understand what that means—other than that it indicates the size and switch clickiness—but I’m enjoying it all the same.

One benefit of being prompted to type more things may be that I post more stuff here than usual. One minor problem is that this may also result in stuff that’s poorly-planned and short. To this I say meh, as well as clickity-clack-clack.

Just yesterday, for some reason I decided to browse Github Trending, which I have pretty much never done. My goodness, what a wonderful collection of code. All sorts of interesting projects seem to show up there, and the majority of them have permissive licenses, in addition to being open source. I thought I had a good idea of the number of meaningful open source projects, but I can see now that there is much more out there than I had imagined. I certainly don’t mind being wrong. If you care about code, give Trending a look.

Here are a few repositories I starred while browsing Trending. Perhaps you’ll find them interesting, as I do.

  • Huginn is more or less self-hosted IFTTT. A simple idea, to be sure, but beautifully-executed, to my eye. There already appear to be lots of “agents” available that talk to various other services. I suppose you have to set up API keys with some of these external services yourself, but once you get it all working, I suspect that Huginn more than returns the time investment. Plus, what a cool way to frame the problem and solution; Huginn is the name of one of the two ravens that sit on Odin’s shoulders and report whatever they see back to him. I will definitely be setting this up on my server soon, and it may even push me to learn some Ruby so I can write my own agents.
  • Public Pentesting Reports is a repository containing just that. I’ve only browsed this a little, but I can already see that this is a good collection of security-related information. These seem to be copies of reports that are generated by actual penetration testing firms, and since they’re meant to teach the companies that hired them how to fix their systems, they naturally inform any reader to the techniques and tricks used by the penetration testers. I plan to cozy up with a few of these at some point, perhaps even hard copies, and read through them over some tea.
  • Rustlings is a companion repository for The Rust Book, a sort of online textbook introduction to Rust. Some time ago, I spent a few hours going through the first chapters of The Rust Book, but I got a little bored by the technical detail. Had I known that this repository existed—or perhaps though to search for it—I may have continued and become a power Rustacean. (That’s what they’re called, right?) Anyway, in my surely limitless spare time I hope to eventually learn some useful Rust, and these exercises may help me to do just that.

So yeah, Github Trending. If you need to kill two (or two hundred) hours and like code, look no further.