¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

My esteemed friend Michael Diamond wrote bkt¹:

bkt (pronounced “bucket”) is a subprocess caching utility written in Rust.

I mentioned it previously as an example on how to create a PKGBUILD for Arch Linux.

Here is the main use case for me:

Assume you have a command that is expensive to run. The command is intended to display information / output about some resources. Even though it’s expensive, its output rarely changes. So that…caching it would be quite beneficial.

For example, a command to list all your cluster nodes alongside some of their properties. Perhaps you need to run that command multiple times a day².

Enter bkt!

By creating an alias or a wrapper function in your shell (e.g. by adding it to your shell rc file) that uses bkt, you can make subsequent command runs complete faster, by leveraging its cache.

active_gardens_pp () {
        bkt --ttl 7d -- {list clusters command} -o json | jq '.[] | select(.active == true and .partition != "private-cloud" and .partition != "gov-cloud")' | mlr --ijson --opprint --barred cat
}

The first time I run active_gardens_pp³, it takes several seconds to complete. The second time, it completes almost instantaneously.

The cache duration can be defined with the --ttl flag. One day or one week or a couple of hours can be sensible defaults, depending on how often you expect the output to change.

And then I should talk about mlr (Miller) another day…