Forem: Julio Daniel Reyes

I made a NES-style 8-bit sequencer app

Julio Daniel Reyes — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:16:11 +0000

Just for fun!

Ever wondered what 8-bit music actually is?

I started asking myself: why 8-bit? What gives it that distinctive sound?

I learned that 8-bit music is mostly a nickname for the sound associated with old game hardware. Those systems used 8-bit processors, had very limited memory, and could not store and play full recorded songs the way modern systems do. Instead, they used dedicated audio hardware (an APU) to generate sound in real time through a small number of voices (channels).

Each voice could only play one note at a time.

The NES APU had 5 channels:

2 pulse voice (square-like waves): melody / harmony
1 triangle voice: bass
1 noise voice: percussion / effects
1 DPCM voice: short samples

That sounded simple and fun enough that I wanted to try building something inspired by it.

So I built my own browser-based NES-style sequencer: Ocho(8)-it!

Open source and MIT licensed.

Stop Sending "Monster" PRs: Use stacked pull requests

Julio Daniel Reyes — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 18:49:06 +0000

Ever worked on a "quick" feature only to realize it involves changes across your data model, services, APIs, and frontend?

You create a single branch, dump 30 commits into it, and open a PR so big your team needs a weekend retreat to review it.

Or even worse, did you ever have to review one of those monster PRs?

That's how you end up with developer fatigue.

Reviewing a large PR takes time if you want quality, yet you're blocking your teammates until it's done.

The trade-off between speed and review depth is real.

You may think, "It's just one PR, no big deal." But what if that becomes the norm for everyone on the team?

So what's the alternative?

Stacked Pull Requests: break the work into tiny, reviewable chunks that land in sequence.

In this video I show the workflow, the manual pain points, and how tools like the Graphite CLI automate the stacking so you can ship faster without the maintenance headaches.

A Better Way to Run Git Worktrees Finally!

Julio Daniel Reyes — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 13:35:04 +0000

I recently found git-gtr, a small CLI by the CodeRabbit team that wraps native Git worktrees and makes them practical for daily use.

Repository: https://github.com/coderabbitai/git-worktree-runner

Install it, create an alias for it alias gw="git gtr" (Easier to remember, but up to you!).

Navigate to your repository
gw new <branchName> will create a new worktree. The first time it will create a new folder in the parent directory <repo>-worktrees, inside it a folder <branchName> for your newly created worktree.
gw editor <branchName> will open the configured code editor.
gw ai <branchName> will start your cli (claude, codex, opencode)
gw run <branchName> <command> will run commands on that worktree
gw rm <branchName> to remove it once you are done.

Full demo in my new vid. Would you use this? or do you prefer the original git command?

(Video) Authentication Service in Actix - Part 1: Configuration

Julio Daniel Reyes — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 05:13:58 +0000

In this video series, I'm going to build an authentication service in Actix.

There are a couple of new libraries that I want to try, and a few people already asked me to do authentication, so let's see how it goes.

The idea is to have a service that will allow the user to create an account, log in and have access to other secure resources. I'm going to do something simple using only JSON Web Tokens, but it will give you an idea of how to implement a more complex setup like combining it with Oauth 2.

In this first part, I will set up the app configuration, the logs, and add a simple health endpoint.

Rust Web development | Boilerplate free with Rocket

Julio Daniel Reyes — Wed, 03 Jun 2020 07:14:23 +0000

An overview of the Rocket web framework for rust.

Type Safe
Boilerplate Free
Easy to use
Extensible

Including examples:

Create a Hello World service
Create a TODO service with a Postgres database using Diesel ORM.

⏱️TIMESTAMPS⏱️
0:00 Rust Web development with Rocket
0:07 What is Rocket?
0:49 Rocket overview
3:32 A couple of things to consider before using Rocket
4:22 Building a Hello World service
8:37 Define custom configuration
9:29 Building a TODO service with a Postgres database
9:34 Setup a Database service using Docker and Docker Compose
10:12 Diesel to manage database migrations
12:19 Diesel and Serde dependencies
12:58 Rearrange the endpoints
13:20 Use the Schema file generated by Diesel
13:47 Define the models for the TODO service
15:04 Define handler to create new TODOs
15:52 How to get a DB connection with Rocket?
17:09 Create new TODO
18:00 Define handler to list all TODOs
18:54 Define the database configuration
19:20 Testing the TODO endpoints
20:27 Bonus: Define endpoint to mark a TODO as checked

📔 Source Code
https://github.com/nemesiscodex/hello-rocket

🚀 Rocket Web Framework
https://rocket.rs/

#3 Building a simple GraphQL API with Actix and Juniper (Rust)

Julio Daniel Reyes — Mon, 11 May 2020 00:48:03 +0000

⏱️TIMESTAMPS⏱️
0:00 Simple GraphQL API with Actix and Juniper - part 3
0:07 Start of the video
0:28 Refactoring of User queries into a repository
4:06 Get a single user
6:45 Code to create and list Posts
11:15 Query the posts on GraphiQL
13:10 Posts as a field of User
15:59 N+1 Problem
16:45 Solution? Dataloaders
17:11 Using a Dataloader to get the posts of an user
26:05 Did it work?
27:39 Thank you!

Part 1
Part 2

My development environment | From scratch | Ubuntu | 2020

Julio Daniel Reyes — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 01:38:52 +0000

Content:
0:07 Start of the video
0:51 Terminals
0:51 - Terminator
2:16 - Alacritty
3:12 Fundamental tools installation - with brief explanation
3:19 - curl
3:28 - git
3:33 - htop
3:39 - vim
3:45 - jq
3:50 - zsh
4:03 - tmux
4:27 Tmux basic usage
5:56 jq overview
6:29 htop overview
6:39 vim basic usage
7:24 zsh overview
7:50 oh my zsh installation
8:58 powerlevel 10k installation (zsh theme)
12:42 powerlevel 10k overview
13:34 fzf installation (fuzzy finder)
14:11 fzf basic usage
15:24 IDEs
15:24 - Intellij Idea (mention)
15:42 - VS Code (mention and installation)
15:59 Nord color theme
16:13 Nord for alacritty
16:53 Jetbrain's Mono Font
17:37 Rust installation
18:00 Customize status bar configuration, add crab emoji (very important)
18:38 Docker installation
20:52 docker-compose installation

#2 Building a simple GraphQL API with Actix and Juniper (Rust)

Julio Daniel Reyes — Mon, 06 Apr 2020 23:09:53 +0000

Part 1

Building a simple GraphQL API with Actix and Juniper (Rust)

Julio Daniel Reyes — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 05:16:02 +0000

Running Actix integration tests with Github actions (Rust)

Julio Daniel Reyes — Sat, 07 Mar 2020 11:59:19 +0000

Error handling and Logging with Actix (Rust)

Julio Daniel Reyes — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 21:05:27 +0000

(Rust-lang) Creating a simple TODO service with Actix [Video] - Part 3

Julio Daniel Reyes — Mon, 17 Feb 2020 21:55:17 +0000

Watch previous parts
Part 1
Part 2