I'm thrilled to announce the release of c5cli version 1.1.1, a significant update that brings a major improvement to how you interact with your configuration files. This release is all about ergonomics and power, directly addressing feedback to make encrypting and decrypting secrets more intuitive and flexible, especially in complex, real-world configurations.

The star of the show? A brand new, expressive path syntax for the encrypt and decrypt commands.

Let's dive in.

The Old Way: Simple, But Limited

Until...

I'm thrilled to announce the release of C5Store 0.4.3, a major update to my Rust configuration management library. This release perfects a powerful new feature I'm calling Transparent Secret Deserialization and follows closely on the heels of another critical addition for production environments: first-class support for systemd Credentials.

You can grab the latest version now on crates.io:
cargo add c5store

For those new to the project, C5Store is a powerful, layered configuration library for Rust applicat...

The libraries I've worked on recently with the help of AI have been non trivial. Like these are not easy projects to do even on your own especially not within the very short time frame I've been able to produce these things. Granted I have quite a lot of expertise in various areas. Let's take a look at what I've produced. All of these libraries are available under the MPL 2.0 license. Free to use, free to modify.

Working in Rust is non-trivial, in of itself. The shock that AI can one shot implementation some...

V1 Was Great, But I Dreamt Bigger

XSMB V1 has been a workhorse for my server-to-server communication for ages (7 years?). Think reliable RPCs, straightforward ...

Xcited to share another something I've been tinkering with: xs_h3, a pure Rust implementation of Uber's H3 geospatial indexing system. If you haven't bumped into H3 before, you can learn a lot more at its official site: h3geo.org. In a nutshell, it's this super smart way of gridding the entire globe into mostly hexagons (plus a few pentagons to make it all fit). It’s the kind of thing that powers a lot of cool location-based features out there – you've probably interacted with it without even knowing!

My fir...

I'm freakin elated to share something I've been hammering away at: rzmq – a pure Rust, async ZeroMQ that's aiming for (and achieving!) a new level of performance on Linux!

If you've been in the distributed systems or messaging game, ZeroMQ (ØMQ) is legendary. It's the swiss-army knife, powerful and flexible. But what if we could take that solid foundation and supercharge it with modern Rust and the raw power of Linux's io_uring? That's rzmq.

The "Why": Rust, Raw Speed, and a Modern Take

So, what's the bi...

Precursor post:https://www.normansoven.com/post/a-pluggable-workflow-engine-is-something-always-been-promised-never-delivered

I DELIVERED BABY!

For the longest time, I've had this itch. You know the one – that recurring problem you see in project after project, the one you know there has to be a better way to solve. For me, that's been orchestrating those complex, multi-step business processes that are the backbone of almost any real-world application.

Think about it: user signup isn't just "create a database ...

I have been exploring all of my ideas from the past. Breathing in life into past ideas and it is exhilarating. Let's talk about SaaS Apps or how larger apps in general suck and how I have an idea that could change this shit and increase developer velocity.

Also if you saw my Schemaless Hierarchical Database post before, the core is done! Benchmarked at sub-millisecond and mostly lower. It's faster than I expected!

I hate frameworks. The ones that try to do everything, prescribe ways to do things and evolve ov...

I've been thinking of a lot of ideas lately, because with the advent of AI, it is now idea frenzy. I never thought about how I gave away a Schema-less Hierarchical Data Store to the world (C5Store). It's actually incredible piece of software never fully appreciated by me because I used it solely as a configuration store, which it does super well. I don't think about what kind of configuration store to use because I have C5Store to unify it all.

So at Uber, I used to work with this piece of software called Cl...

Some of the libraries were a long time coming and the others just spur of the moment thoughts.

I released TurnKeeper, a comprehensive Job Scheduler library in Rust. 

Spawn Point, a comprehensive scaffolding application. 

oss-porter, a way to contribute to open source parts of your internal projects quickly and pain free especially at companies.

RockSolid, a "ORM" for rocksdb. It is effectively a formalization of all the code I've been copying around my projects to make it faster to do rocksdb operations.

natlex_...