Author

About the Author

Hi, Iโ€™m Rakesh Venkat โ€” a developer, researcher, and lifelong tinkerer who likes building tools that:

  • Automate away repetitive work
  • Make it easier to explore ideas
  • Give people nicer ways to learn from and navigate code

Most of the projects in this book revolves around:

  • ๐Ÿฆ€ Rust and terminal tools
  • ๐Ÿงช Ratatui TUIs (very meta)
  • ๐Ÿ“š Documentation and knowledge organization
  • ๐Ÿงฉ Small research & experiments that later become libraries or tools

I think of this book as a logbook of the systems Iโ€™m building and how they fit together.

What Iโ€™m Trying to Do With These Projects

The broader goals behind these tools:

  • Build high-leverage tools that save time for other developers.
  • Collect and organize knowledge (like the Ratatui ecosystem) so people donโ€™t have to rediscover the same things repeatedly.
  • Treat documentation as a first-class artifact, not an afterthought.

ratcrate-core is one piece of that: a way to turn a noisy, low-level index into a structured, queryable view of an ecosystem.

Future projects like ratcrate-cli, ratcrate-tui, and doc2quarto are meant to build on top of that foundation.

A Note to Future Me (and Future Readers)

This book is partly a gift to future me: so I can come back in six months, read a chapter, and instantly remember why I made certain decisions.

If youโ€™re reading it as someone else:

  • I hope it helps you understand the design of these projects.
  • Iโ€™d love it if it inspires you to build your own tools, or contribute ideas and improvements.




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