On a whim, I recently migrated all of my Git repositories to a cgit instance on WIREDNET. It's caused some headaches because the server-side rendering can be quite resource intensive. Mere minutes after setting it up, the fans on my server spun up because the repos were being scraped by ClaudeBot and friends. I hadn't linked to it from anywhere, so it's likely they found it from LetsEncrypt's issuance logs. It was easy enough to mitigate the scraping by putting a robots.txt up, and I was able to forget about it for a month or so, until I was sitting at work and got an alert from Gatus that several of my services were down. I checked the logs and saw that Apache was being hammered by 47.76.0.0/14 (no name provided) and 47.80.0.0/13 (Alibaba Cloud LLC), which I blocked at the firewall level. This was enough to mitigate the attack, but I was still seeing an unusual amount of traffic in my Apache logs. cgit was, once again, being aggressively scraped. Most of my repositories are small, but I had a mirror of Guix from when I was doing GSOC, and forks of a few other popular repositories, and the crawlers were just going through every single link generated by cgit (basically encompassing the entire source tree for every single commit in the repository). I was reminded of Konstantin Ryabitsev's blog post "Creepy Crawlies", which contains this helpful piece of intuition: "if [an IP is] asking for an old commit in a random old fork, it's probably not a real developer trying to do their work." I don't see any reason that someone would be looking that far into a Guix mirror that's several years out of date, so I wrote a fail2ban rule.

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Nearly every programming language has some flavor of "structure" declaration, where the programmer can conjure a new type representing the composition of other primitive types or structures, neatly organized into named fields. While the concept is practically universal, the way the programmer defines and interacts with these types can vary dramatically between languages. In Scheme, such structures are called "records". I found that the existing facilities left a lot to be desired, so I wrote a few macros to provide an experience more akin to Common Lisp.

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Packed lunches are a great way to save money, but being limited to foods palatable at room temperature (or colder) can be a little discouraging. In most American workplaces, a microwave oven is readily available in the breakroom, making it easy to reheat a home-cooked meal. However, after leaving a desk-bound white-collar job for one that often takes me into the field, that's only occasionally an option. So I DIY'd a device for warming up food that's portable and usable in almost any situation.

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