#Scripting over sleeping
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August 5th, 2026
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There's this annoying duality in my metabolism that makes me love coffee and, at the same time, be very sensitive to caffeine. And its effect on me is not what I'd expect. I can, actually, sleep. It's just that I never try.

For a long while now I've been fascinated by the concept of web pages generated by CGI scripts. I ran into some arcane URLs with the ".cgi" suffix right on my first job as a computer engineer, and the seniors told me those were the ancestors of the services I was coding, and they had been written in C. I had been taught C in college, or so they told me when I passed the data structures course. Why, then, couldn't I even conceive the idea of writing a web page in that language?

Fast-forward a decade or two and the curiosity still lingered in the back of my mind. I had learned a good deal over the years about the Internet, from a technical and an emotional perspectives. I had also had enough programming experience to climb the Dunning-Kruger ladder and realise that no, I didn't know C. Not really. But I could learn...

When I came across SDF, the retrocomputing movement and the smolweb, I set myself the goal of building my own home page so I could finally crack the secrets of CGI scripts, and practice C, too, for good measure. About TWO YEARS went by doing the I-have-no-time square dance until recently I managed to get back into the habit of reading, and reading led to writing, and writing led me to start making time for myself. Last night, though, "making time" came at the cost of... well... sleeping.

I set up my Gemini capsule just last week, and immediately I realised I didn't want to have two separate online spaces for two different communities; I'd rather concentrate on being an active Gemini user whilst gently introducing people to this universe via the large web. The perfect opportunity for my CGI deep-dive! The final ingredient to make it happen — yes, that cup of coffee I made after 5PM.

So from 8PM — 4AM I sat with my highly unorthodox setup, coding C inside Neovim on Termux in an e-ink Android tablet on my couch, ignoring all judgement from my wife and my dog, with no assistance other than the clang compiler error messages and the C standard library documentation on my phone. At the end of it I had "webloupe.cgi", a script that gets the path to a gemini document and returns an HTML complete with the styling of my blog.

Getting through the mourning chores was tricky, I'll admit it. But soon I got going in a great mood, and I haven't felt tired at all. Turns out it was that challenge that had to be put to sleep last night, not me. Thank you, caffeine, I guess?

I'll share the code later on. Maybe after I lie down for a bit...