Hexmap: Week 0x00

We’ve decided to spend our Christmastime on personal projects, and I want to learn something new and interesting. Maybe Python, or Rust, or Go. I also have this stale old dream of bringing all my location history data into one visualization using the H3 grid, so “Hexmap” is born.

I built some hello-worlds in each, and Rust feels the most natural to me. I can’t abide by the meaningful whitespace and dynamic typing of Python. Go feels somehow too restrictive, with a “right way” to do everything. Rust is a bit too low-level for applicaiton code, but the complier is really helpful so it feels approachable.

I’m tired of the bitrot with Ruby on Rails. I do want “rails”, though, to walk in the footsteps of the experienced. Not to restrict but to guide.

I also too old for the nosql “manage your own relational” thing, so expect to use Postgres.

I spent way too much time last week looking into which web framework I would like, but colleagues convinced me Axum is where the mojo is. Looking for example code, I found Rust on Nails which got me started with a dev container, DBMate and Cornucopia. SQLx seems to be a more popular choice for RDBMS work, but for now I like the way Cornucopia manages queries.

I hate that we just assume script-driven frontends and will insist on web-native server generation of HTML.