Hi! I’m Amos, better known as @fasterthanlime.
I make articles and videos about how computers work. My content is long-form, didactic and exploratory — and often an excuse to teach Rust!
I also co-host Self-Directed Research with James.
You can read more about me, if you insist.
Recent articles View all
That health is mental
11 min
Disclaimer:
Trigger warning: depression, talk of suicide.
It’s been a while since I wrote a mental health piece — but I think it’s important to occasionally stop, take a breather, and think about how we feel.
So.
deep breath
I’m okay, I think? Just a little restless.
A bit of personal context
For those keeping score, I went through major life events in 2023 — a divorce, a move, and the news that I might need a second round of jaw surgery.
More devops than I bargained for
21 min
Background
I recently had a bit of impromptu disaster recovery, and it gave me a hunger for more! More downtime! More kubernetes manifest! More DNS! Ahhhh!
The plan was really simple. I love dedicated Hetzner servers with all my heart but they are not very fungible.
You have to wait entire minutes for a new dedicated server to be provisioned. Sometimes you pay a setup fee, et cetera. And at some point to server static websites and serve as a K3S server, it’s simply just too big, and approximately twice the price that I should pay.
Impromptu disaster recovery
40 min
Background
im-promp-tu (
im-ˈpräm(p)-(ˌ)tü)
made, done, or formed on or as if on the spur of the moment: improvised
composed or uttered without previous preparation: extemporaneous
On March 18th, 2025, I thought I would look into self-hosted project management solutions — something kanban-y, but.. better?
This one does not spark joy.
The case for sans-io
26 min
exclusive
The most popular option to decompress ZIP files from the Rust programming language is a crate simply named zip — At the time of this writing, it has 48 million downloads. It’s fully-featured, supporting various compression methods, encryption, and even supports writing zip files.
However, that’s not the crate everyone uses to read ZIP files. Some applications benefit from using asynchronous I/O, especially if they decompress archives that they download from the network.
Catching up with async Rust
20 min
exclusive
In December 2023, a minor miracle happened: async fn in traits shipped.
As of Rust 1.39, we already had free-standing async functions:
pub async fn read_hosts() -> eyre::Result<Vec<u8>> {
// etc.
}
…and async functions in impl blocks:
impl HostReader {
pub async fn read_hosts(&self) -> eyre::Result<Vec<u8>> {
// etc.
}
}
Highlighted code in slides
15 min
exclusive
I have obsessed about this long enough, I think it’s only fair I (and you!) get some content out of it.
When I started writing this article, I was working on my P99 CONF slides. Those slides happen to include some bits of code. And because I’m a perfectionist, I would like this code to be syntax highlighted, like this:
let addr: SocketAddr = config.address.parse()?;
let ln = TcpListener::bind(&addr).await?;
info!("🦊 {}", config.base_url);
ktls now under the rustls org
3 min
What’s a ktls
I started work on ktls and ktls-sys, a pair of crates exposing Kernel TLS offload to Rust, about two years ago.
kTLS lets the kernel (and, in turn, any network interface that supports it) take care of encryption, framing, etc., for the entire duration of a TLS connection… as soon as you have a TLS connection.
For the handshake itself (hellos, change cipher, encrypted extensions, certificate verification, etc.), you still have to use a userland TLS implementation.
State of the fasterthanlime 2024
17 min
It’s time for some personal and professional news!
TL;DR: I started a podcast with James, I’m stable on antidepressants, I’m giving a P99 CONF about my Rust/io_uring/HTTP work, I’m trying on “they/them” as pronouns, I’m open-sourcing merde_json, rubicon and others, I got a divorce in 2023, I found a new business model.
Now that we’re on the same page: let’s unpack this a bit!
Latest series View all
Building a Rust service with Nix
3 hours 1 min
complete
I often give bits and pieces of advice on how to build Rust stuff the comfy way. But it can be hard to see how everything comes together, especially when it comes to, say, deploying a web service in production.
So, let’s start from the very beginning (setting up a Linux VM), and march together towards the objective: a production-grade Rust web service, built with Nix.
Advent of Code 2022
3 hours 12 min
complete
Let’s use the Advent of Code 2022, a series of programming challenges of increasing difficulty, to learn more about the Rust programming language.
Updating fasterthanli.me for 2022
57 min
complete
In 2020, I switched from a static site generator to something homemade.
And, as tradition commands, I did a whole write-up about it.
Since writing articles and making videos is now my full-time
occupation, I took some time
to upgrade futile, my server software, to the latest and greatest the
Rust ecosystem has to offer.
Don't shell out!
1 hour 40 min
complete
In this series, I change a critical component of this website’s asset pipeline from “just calling a bunch of external tools” to statically linking with everything I need to process assets. It involves autoconf, CMake, Meson, CI, pkg-config, and some code crimes.
Ever wonder who's behind all this content?