new blog post about nginx

Justfile

@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 serve:
-    hugo serve --bind 0.0.0.0 --buildDrafts
+    hugo serve --bind 0.0.0.0 --port 8313 --buildDrafts
 
 linkcheck:
     wget --spider -r -nd -nv -H -l 1 http://localhost:1313

content/posts/2023-05-06-equivalences.lagda.md

@@ -1,11 +1,14 @@
-+++
-title = "Equivalences"
-slug = "equivalences"
-date = 2023-05-06
-tags = ["type-theory", "agda", "hott"]
-math = true
-draft = true
-+++
+---
+title: "Equivalences"
+slug: "equivalences"
+date: 2023-05-06
+tags:
+- type-theory
+- agda
+- hott
+math: true
+draft: true
+---
 
 <details>
   <summary>Imports</summary>
@@ -55,7 +58,6 @@ we can just give $y$ again, and use the `refl` function above for the equality
 proof
 
 ```
-Bool-id-is-equiv .equiv-proof y .fst = y , Bool-id-refl y
 ```
 
 The next step is to prove that it's contractible. Using the same derivation for
@@ -71,26 +73,72 @@ when $i = i0$, and something that equals the fiber $y_1$'s preimage $x_1$ when
 $i = i1$, aka $y \equiv proj_1\ y_1$.
 
 ```
+
+-- 2023-05-13: Favonia's hint is to compute "ap g p", and then concatenate
+-- it with a proof that g is the left-inverse of f
+-- ok i'm pretty sure this should be the g = f^-1
+Bool-id-inv : Bool → Bool
+Bool-id-inv b = (((Bool-id-is-equiv .equiv-proof) b) .fst) .fst
+
+Bool-id-inv-is-inv : (b : Bool) → Bool-id-inv (Bool-id b) ≡ b
+Bool-id-inv-is-inv true =
+    Bool-id-inv (Bool-id true)
+  ≡⟨ refl ⟩
+    Bool-id-inv true
+  ≡⟨ refl ⟩
+    -- This isn't trivially true?
+    (Bool-id-is-equiv .equiv-proof true .fst) .fst
+  ≡⟨ ? ⟩
+    true
+  ∎
+Bool-id-inv-is-inv false = ?
+
+Bool-id-is-equiv .equiv-proof y .fst = y , Bool-id-refl y
+
 Bool-id-is-equiv .equiv-proof y .snd y₁ i .fst =
   let
     eqv = snd y₁
     -- eqv : Bool-id (fst y₁) ≡ y
+    -- this is the second pieece of the other fiber passed in
 
     eqv2 = eqv ∙ sym (Bool-id-refl y)
     -- eqv2 : Bool-id (fst y₁) ≡ Bool-id y
+    -- concat the fiber (Bool-id (fst y₁) ≡ y) with (y ≡ Bool-id y) to get the
+    -- path from (Bool-id (fst y₁) ≡ Bool-id y)
 
     -- Ok, unap doesn't actually exist unless f is known to have an inverse.
     -- Fortunately, because we're proving an equivalence, we know that f has an
-    -- inverse, in particular going from y to x, which in thise case is also y.
+    -- inverse, in particular going from y to x, which in this case is also y.
     eqv3 = unap Bool-id eqv2
 
-    Bool-id-inv : Bool → Bool
-    Bool-id-inv b = (((Bool-id-is-equiv .equiv-proof) b) .fst) .fst
+    -- Then, ap g p should be like:
+    ap-g-p : Bool-id-inv (Bool-id (fst y₁)) ≡ Bool-id-inv (Bool-id y)
+    ap-g-p = cong Bool-id-inv eqv2
+
+    -- OHHHHH now we just need to find that Bool-id-inv (Bool-id y) ≡ y, and
+    -- then we can apply it to both sides to simplify
+    -- So something like this:
+
+    -- left-id : Bool-id-inv ∙ Bool-id ≡ ?
+    -- left-id = ?
 
     eqv3′ = cong Bool-id-inv eqv2
     give-me-info = ?
     -- eqv3 : fst y₁ ≡ y
 
+    -- Use the equational reasoning shitter
+    final : y ≡ fst y₁
+    final =
+        y
+      ≡⟨ ? ⟩
+        fst y₁
+      ∎
+```
+
+Blocked on this issue: https://git.mzhang.io/school/cubical/issues/1
+
+```
+    eqv4′ = ?
     eqv4 = sym eqv3
     -- eqv4 : y ≡ fst y₁
   in
@@ -118,3 +166,13 @@ Bool-id-is-equiv .equiv-proof y .snd y₁ i .snd j =
   in
   ?
   ```
+
+Blocked on this issue: https://git.mzhang.io/school/cubical/issues/2
+  ```
+```
+
+## Other Equivalences
+
+There are 2 other ways we can define equivalences:
+
+TODO: Talk about them being equivalent to each other

content/posts/2023-07-04-learn-by-implementing-nginx.md

@@ -0,0 +1,190 @@
++++
+title = "Learn by implementing Nginx's reverse proxy"
+date = 2023-07-04
+tags = ["web", "learn-by-implementing"]
++++
+
+What the hell does nginx do? Let's replicate it.
+
+- A proxy usually lets you access a site through some gateway when reaching that
+    site when your client is sitting behind some intercepting firewall
+- A _reverse_ proxy lets others access a site through some gateway when reaching
+    a server that's serving a site from behind a firewall
+
+As a middleman, it gets all requests and can introspect on the header and body
+details. Which means it can:
+
+- Serve multiple domains on the same server / port
+- Wrap unencrypted services using HTTPS
+- Perform load balancing
+- Perform some basic routing
+- Apply authentication
+- Serve raw files without a server program
+
+I'm going to implement this using Deno.
+
+<details>
+  <summary>Imports</summary>
+
+  ```ts
+  import { serve } from "https://deno.land/std@0.192.0/http/mod.ts";
+  const PORT = parseInt(Deno.env.get("PORT") || "8314");
+  ```
+</details>
+
+Deno implements an HTTP server for us. On a really high level, what this means
+is it starts listening for TCP connections, and once it receives one, listens
+for request headers and parses it. It then exposes methods for us to read the
+headers and decide how to further receive the body. All we need to do is provide
+it an async function to handle the request, and return a response. Something
+like this:
+
+```ts
+// @ts-ignore
+async function handlerImpl1(request: Request): Promise<Response> {
+  // code goes here...
+}
+
+// Later,
+// serve(handlerImpl1, { port: PORT });
+```
+
+Now one of the primarily utilties of something like Nginx is something called
+**virtual hosts**. In networking, you would call a host the machine that runs
+the server program. However, virtual hosts means the same machine can run
+multiple server programs. This is possible because in the HTTP header
+information, the client sends the domain it's trying to access.
+
+```
+Host: example.com
+```
+
+Using this info, the server can decide to route the request differently on a
+per-domain basis. Something like SSH is not able to do this because nowhere
+during the handshake process does the client ever request a particular domain.
+You would have to wrap SSH with something else that's knowledgeable about that.
+
+In our reverse-proxy example, we would want to redirect the request internally
+to some different server, and then serve the response back to the client
+transparently so it never realizes it went through a middleman!
+
+So let's say we get some kind of config from the server admin, saying where to
+send each request. It looks like this:
+
+```ts
+interface Config1 {
+  /** An object mapping a particular domain to a destination URL */
+  [domain: string]: string;
+}
+```
+
+Let's wrap our function with another function, where we can take in the config
+and make it accessible to the handler.
+
+<details>
+  <summary>Why?</summary>
+
+  The `serve` here is what's called a **higher-order function**. This means that
+  rather than passing just data to it, we're passing it a function as a
+  _variable_ to store and call of its own volition. A common example of
+  a higher-order function is `Array.map`, where you take a function and apply it
+  to all elements within the array.
+
+  So since `serve` is calling our handler, we cannot change its signature.
+  That's because in order to change its signature, we have to change where it's
+  called, which is inside the Deno standard library.
+
+  Fortunately, functions capture variables (like `config`) from outside of their
+  scope, and when we pass it to `serve`, it retains those captured variables.
+
+  For an implementation like this, you don't actually need to wrap it in another
+  function like `mkHandler2`, but I'm doing it here to make it easier to
+  separate out the code into pieces that fit the prose of the blog post. You
+  could just as well just define it like this:
+
+  ```
+  const config = { ... };
+  const handler = async function(request: Request): Promise<Response> {
+    // code goes here...
+  };
+  serve(handler, { port: PORT });
+  ```
+</details>
+
+```ts
+function mkHandler2(config: Config1) {
+  // @ts-ignore
+  return async function(request: Request): Promise<Response> {
+    // code goes here...
+  }
+}
+```
+
+I'm going to write this in the most straightforward way possible, ignoring
+`null` cases. Obviously in a real implementation, you would want to do error
+checking and recovery (since the reverse proxy server must never crash, right?)
+
+```ts
+function mkHandler3(config: Config1) {
+  return async function(request: Request): Promise<Response> {
+    // Look for the host header
+    const hostHeader = request.headers.get("Host") as string;
+
+    // Look it up in our config
+    const proxyDestinationPrefix = config[hostHeader] as string;
+
+    // Let's fetch the destination and return it!
+    const requestUrl = new URL(request.url);
+    const fullUrl = proxyDestinationPrefix + requestUrl.pathname;
+    return await fetch(fullUrl);
+  }
+}
+```
+
+Time to run it!
+
+```ts
+const config = {
+  "localhost:8314": "https://example.com",
+  "not-example.com": "https://text.npr.org",
+};
+const handler = mkHandler3(config);
+serve(handler, { port: PORT });
+```
+
+First, try just making a request to `localhost:8314`. This is as easy as:
+
+```bash
+curl http://localhost:8314
+```
+
+This should load example.com, like we defined in our config. We did a simple
+proxy, fetched the resource, and sent it back to the user. If there was a
+resource that was not previously available to the public, but the reverse-proxy
+could reach it, the public can now access it. Our reverse proxy feature is done.
+
+Next, try making a request to not-example.com. However, we're going to use a
+trick in curl to make it not resolve the address on its own, but force it to use
+our domain. This trick is just for demonstration purposes, but it emulates a
+real-world need to have multiple domains pointed to the same IP (for example,
+for serving the redirect from company.com to www.company.com on the same server)
+
+```bash
+curl --connect-to not-example.com:80:localhost:8314 http://not-example.com
+```
+
+This should produce the HTML for NPR's text-only page. This demonstrates that we
+can serve different content depending on the site that's requested.
+
+## Conclusion
+
+This is a very bare-bones implementation, and lacks lots of detail. For a
+non-exhaustive list of improvements, consider:
+
+- Can we have the web server remove a prefix from the requested url's path name
+    if we want to serve a website from a non-root path?
+- Can we allow the reverse-proxy to reject requests directly by IP?
+- Can we wrap non-HTTP content?
+- What are some performance improvements we could make?
+
+In a potential future blog post, I'll explore some of these topics.