Happy hacking on my Gemini server

As previously mentioned, I've been writing a simple Gemini server in spare moments. I think it's pretty close to being ready to use for real and I'm finding that quite exciting.

I've been writing software for more years than I care to remember and it never gets boring. Building something yourself and releasing it to the world is easier now than it ever has been, and fun! I wonder if authors and artists feel the same.

Anyway, it's in a state where I can tinker around and adding new features is pretty straightforward. Plus as it's mine, I can just add what I need or feel like working on for a bit of fun. Over the last couple of days I gave it:

The ability to load index files for a directory

A simple logging framework (I'm not going to use log4j!)

Load configuration from file

Which all seem obvious and simple, but enjoyable to work through one at a time and tick them off my imaginary todo list.

What I haven't done yet was restrict access to directories based on client certificates. I looked at that but realised that I need to put aside time to actually read about cryptography and keystores; it's not something I can just pick up and expect to do without knowing how to deal with self-signed certificates while testing.

The code needs tidying up a bit and I'll do some of that next, plus some documentation on configuring and running it before making the source public. I'm hoping that even if nobody wants to use the software, it would be a nice thing to reference on my CV should I find myself applying for an engineering role again (assuming anyone will have me!)