Hi folks!

Over the weekend I was enlisted to produce a proof of concept demo, to pitch as part of a project proposal presentation. Perfect!

I did so, and they're happy (pleased?) with the result. The demo I've produced is a CLI application that reads an input file from the filesystem specified at runtime. It outputs to stdout and takes input from stdin. Very barebones demo. I implemented this program in Rust, and suffices for this purpose. They are planning to screenshare during the presentation to show off the capability.

However, it would be ideal if there were some way to share this demo easily - they could just provide a URL and get something to play with.

Options I've considered:

1) Refactor into a WASM module, build a very simple JS webapp with DOM elements for inputs and outputs. I've started doing this, but it's non-trivial.
2) Throw the whole thing on a DigitalOcean droplet and let people ssh to the box.
3) Re-implement the whole thing in JavaScript.

I will not be doing #3, this demo has a total useful life of a single day, and it's not worth the effort. If the project is picked up, we're starting from scratch.

I did take a stab at #1, but it's not straightforward. I hadn't anticipated this need, so it's not a completely straightforward refactor to also not break the current stdout/stdin functionality. I think this is the nicest option, but it is not simple to produce from my current code in one day. With a little more time, this is absolutely what I would do, but I don't want to rush it.

That leaves me with #2, but I don't really know how safe or reasonable that is. What I'm thinking is that I'd just pop the compiled executable on a droplet with all the demo input files there ready to go, and then users could log in remotely and execute from there. Is that horrendous?

Pressure is low - what I've produced to date will be fine, this is a nice-to-have that would be great to deliver. I've only got this afternoon to pull it together, though, so complexity needs to be low.

How would you solve this problem?

Aside: one of my first ever billable pieces of work was in Rust and I am just over the moon about that.

Photo by Thomas Jensen on Unsplash