You Win Some, You Lose Some: on Papercraft and more

11·11·2025

In the last few weeks I’ve been busy with a few different projects, and I guess I’m not the only freelancer who has trouble finding their work-life balance. That is, in the last few weeks life has been hitting me in the face, and it was a bit overwhelming. But I still did manage to make some progress on my work, and thought I might share it here.

Papercraft Update

Since releasing Papercraft 3.0, I’ve been busy preparing a talk on Papercraft for Paris.rb. To me this was a major undertaking, since I’ve near-zero experience doing conference talks, and for me this was a test of my writing abilities, as well as my talking abilities. More on that in a moment.

I also managed to release a few more versions of Papercraft, which is now at version 3.2.0. Here are the major changes since version 3.0:

Fixed compilation of ternary operator expressions, so stuff like x ? h1('foo') : h2('bar') will compile correctly.
Added an optional Proc API, so you could do stuff like template.html(...) instead of calling Papercraft.html(template, ...). To use this API you need to first require "papercraft/proc". This essentially restores the pre-3.0 API, but as an opt-in.

Added Tilt integration, so you could use Papercraft with Tilt. Tilt is a generic interface for using different Ruby template engines. Here’s an example of how to use it:

require 'tilt/papercraft'

t = Tilt['papercraft'].new {
  "
    h1 locals[:a]
    p locals[:b]
    render block if block
  "
}

t.render(Object.new, a: 'foo', b: 'bar') {
  hr
}
#=> "<h1>foo</h1><p>bar</p><hr>"

The Paris.rb Talk

It actually took me a few weeks of writing and rewritng to finally arrive at a talk that I found both interesting and to the point. I wanted to talk about Papercraft and the functional style in Ruby, but without falling into the trap of discussing all of the theoretical stuff around functional programming. I mean, there’s already a lot of that on YouTube, and I also find it kind of tedious. I really prefer to stick to practical stuff, like what can we learn from functional programming that makes us into better programmers.

So, when the day came I took the train to Paris, had a couple hours to burn so I just sat in a café and rehearsed the text over and over. I thought I had it. But when the time finally came to give the talk later that evening, something happened, something that hasn’t happened to me in a while - I had a panic on stage. Well, I didn’t start screaming or anything, but as I started talking I suddenly felt like I had no air. I tried to calm myself and breathe but it was like my body was tightening into a coil, I felt like I was drowning. Somehow, I pulled through, I just went through the text and the slides as best I could, and as I got to the end, I had calmed down enough to be able to be present and responsive to the people in the audience. There were some questions from the audience, and I was calm enough to be able to answer, but inside I just felt crushed and beaten.

This, I mean stage fright, is something I’ve been struggling with over the years, but after the positive experience of my lightning talk at Euruko I thought I finally made some progress on this front. This experience was so discouraging that afterwards I felt completely empty and without energy. I still want to do more public speaking, and I think I have interesting stuff to share, but every such negative experience just adds to my predicament. Well, I guess I still have more work to do, you win some, you lose some…

By the way, the Euruko talks are now available on YouTube. You can find my Papercraft lightning talk here. The slides for the Paris.rb talk are here.

UringMachine Grant Work

I’ve written before about UringMachine, a Ruby gem low-level I/O using io_uring. I’m pleased to announce that I’m the recipient of a grant for working on UringMachine from the Ruby Association in Japan.

In this project, I’ll work on three things:

Developing a FiberScheduler implementation for UringMachine, in order to be able to allow its use in any fiber-based Ruby application.
Bringing SSL/TLS capabilities to UringMachine, in order to allow building high-performance clients and servers using encrypted connections.
Bringing more io_uring features to UringMachine, such as writev, splice, fsync, fadvise etc.

I’ll also take the time to work on documentation, benchmarks, and correctness of the implementation.

I’ll write here regularly about my progress. The grant also requires me publish a progress report around December, and then a final report on my work in March.

A New Client

I’ve just received a new commission for creating a blog website. The client is a person I love deeply - my daughter Noa. She has some very specific requirements regarding the design, functionality, and privacy concerns of the blog, so for me this is a challenge to see how far I can take my personal web framework, and how far I can push the new ideas and techniques I’ve been developing for my work.

As I develop and discover solutions for the different problems this new project presents, I’ll try to generalize them and fold them into Syntropy, so I’ll be able to use them for other projects as well.