Projects

I’m almost always working on a few projects on the side, mostly to scratch an itch, or learn something new – usually both. Lately I’ve become increasingly fond of functional programming, and thus like to play around with Haskell, Purescript (my favorite language to play with at the moment), and ZIO (quickly becoming the best functional library for Scala, IMO).

Most of my projects and interests these days tend to be in the blockchain / crypto spaces, or the privacy / digital-self-sovereignty spaces. Functional, typesafe programming is incredibly useful in both of these, as they make code easier to reason about and formally prove things about. Correctness and ability to formulate mathematical proofs around key pieces of code are crucial for trusting the code your machines are running. With decentralized, “trustless” networks, and in privacy-centric software, the correctness and verifiability of the code and smart contracts is crucial.

I’m also very interested in Rust, as I believe it is one of the most novel languages to come around in a long time, and offers very interesting guarantees around memory safety without needing garbage collection. This also makes Rust an incredibly useful tool for low-level applications that need to be very performant. The typesystem in Rust is also sufficiently advanced enough to give quite good typesafety around your programs behavior when leverage correctly. I’m excited to see Rust becoming one of the de-facto standard tools for many blockchain projects.

If you have ideas for fun or interesting projects, or tools you’d like to see, I’m always interested in new ideas and new projects, so let me know.

Current Projects

• Prognosticator: Prognosticator is a web app for tracking prediction probabilities over time. It’s still a work in progress, but I’m using it as an app to learn more about Halogen (v5), a typesfae UI framework built for Purescript.

• Willwolf.me: This website, of course. It’s evolved from a php site many many years ago, to a statically-built website for simplicity and ease of maintenance. It was first built using Jekyll, but is currently generated using Hakyll, a Haskell-based static site generator. Why Hakyll? Well, mostly because I love functional programming.

Past Projects

• Tezos HSM Signer: The Tezos HSM Signer interfaces with a Tezos full node to offload cryptographic signing operations to a Hardware Security Module (HSM). This enables users to keep the private keys to their tezos nodes on secure hardware, and off of the boxes running their full nodes. This application is written in Haskell due to the sensitive security nature of what it does.

• Bitcore SPV: To my knowledge this was the first full Bitcoin SPV node that could run entirely in the Chrome Browser. The Chrome wrapper can be found here, which was also capable of running on Google Chromebooks.

• Chrome Trezor: This was the first (to my knowledge) working javascript, browser-compatible, implementation of the Trezor hardware wallet device protocol in ~2015. This enabled early users to interface with their Trezor wallets from the browser. Code from this repository was later used by the official Trezor team, and integrated into their official wallet cilent and website.

• Loeb.purs: Implementation of Loeb’s Theorem in Purescript, just because.

• Purescript Graphql: Still a WIP, but this is an attempt to create a typesafe GraphQL library for Purescript.

• Purescript Base58: This is a simple base58 FFI wrapper for Purescript. Base58 is mostly used in blockchain projects for relatively short, human-friendly addresses, and was really created for use in Bitcoin.

• Purescript NaCl: This is a simple NaCL wrapper for Purescript, such that the cryptographic primitives exposed by NaCL can be used in a typesafe, functional way in Purescript applications.

• Pyckup: Pyckup is a command-line backup tool, based on duplicity, which can very easily and simply back up local files and directories in a space-efficient way, by chunking, hashing, and de-duplicating file contents before backing up. It also enables you to encrypt backups with a public PGP key, such that the private key doesn’t need to exist on the box you are backing up data from. This tool is useful for backing up important scripts and configs on servers in a secure, reliable, space-efficient way.

• Octo-Indicator: Linux app to show your github activity and notifications in the Gnome menubar. This was mostly a toy to learn how to do this, implemented in Python.

• Sque: Sque is a simple, STOMP-based message queueing and de/serialization framework for Perl, modeled heavily after Resque, but striving for a much simpler implementation and use.

• VimChat: Jabber chat client that runs inside the Vim text editor. It supports jabber, as well as transports to enable connecting to other networks like IRC. Additionally, it has support for OTR off-the-record encryption in chats with other clients that support it. Originally built in 2009, I used it pretty heavily through at least 2012.

• Dancebin: Dancebin is a perl-based Pastebin website, using the Perl Dancer web framework. It is designed to be incredibly simple, and easy to spin up and use.

• App-Notes: This is a simple command-line note-taking tool that enables quick, organized note-taking, backed by a git repositor so you never lose anything.