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Hi! I'm Lexi. I'm 17, and one of the things I'm interested in is gaining a deeper understanding of how computers work and showing that in new ways. A few months ago I published https://cpu.land (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37062422).
After cpu.land, I felt a lot of pressure to make another Big Giant Thing but didn't really have anything compelling. So I just hacked away on personal projects and, through some coincidental learning on how the Internet works, ended up hacking together a traceroute program that could live stream to a website from scratch!
I realized I had never seen this sort of thing on the web before, and it was actually a kind of cool and novel way of visualizing the structure of the Internet, so I polished it up and built a pretty site around it. In the process, I learned some really interesting things about how BGP and the structure of The Internet, so I melted the traceroute tool with an article sharing that knowledge.
I'm still hacking on this and I'm sure my code will manage to break somehow, so please let me know if you have any suggestions! :)
(Side note: why Rust? I don’t think programming language choice matters that much, but I wanted to quickly write a very dependable low-level program, and I really like Rust’s error handling primitives.
Cool project! Two suggestions, one serious, one frivolous:
- I wonder if you could get more accurate results by using TCP or UDP instead of ICMP. I think traditional traceroute has an option to use UDP, mtr [1] can use TCP or UDP, and tcptraceroute [2] can use TCP.
- This would be a perfect fit for some Talking Heads references. "And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?" [3]
[1] https://github.com/traviscross/mtr
[2] https://linux.die.net/man/1/tcptraceroute
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_in_a_Lifetime_(Talking_He...