Post Mortem: Dune Head App

Thoughts on rust

This program was my first attempt at using the rust programming language. There are many things that I like about rust, such as the portability and lack of a need for garbage collection. There was a bit of a learning curve in the syntax and my way of thinking. Rust’s concept of variable ownership (while it gives it it’s powerful memory promises) was confusing to me when I first approached it. In addition, I am still learning the difference between “&str”, “String” and “&String”. Another thing which I dislike about rust is the necessity of third-party crates for some features that I am used to having in the dotnet framework, such as serialization and the like.

Dune-Head-App

This app pulls the top searches from the google trends website. This website lists the top trends within a certain demographic, as well as images and news articles about the trends. I scrape the RSS feed of the US trending topics, and I parse it using the serde_xml_rs library. I then choose a random topic from these topics, and send a HTTP POST request to a Discord webhook. The webhook is specified in an environment variable, so that it could be easily changed during testing and it can be kept separate from the code. I have this bot running on my home computer in a cron job at 9 am every morning in order to keep my discord server up to date on current events. Truly there is no better way than this.

Here is a link to the code for perusing.