A solo Rust tool that installs like a real product
The falsifiable questionCan one person ship a native developer tool with the full distribution surface — versioned releases, checksums, a Homebrew tap, a landing page — not just a repo?
Baseline withheld (no measured comparison against existing monitors); external withheld until install counts or user reports exist.
Baseline
The default fate of side-project CLIs: a GitHub repo you must clone and compile yourself, with no releases, no checksums, and no upgrade path.
Method
PerfPulse: a Rust system-monitor for developers (23 modules, LTO release profile, CLI + TUI + web dashboard surfaces). Distribution: versioned tarballs for darwin-arm64 and x86_64 with pinned SHA-256 hashes, a public Homebrew tap with an install test, and a landing page with install instructions.
Measured result
brew install works against real binaries: the v1.5.4 darwin-arm64 tarball serves HTTP 200 at 2,071,219 bytes. The tap formula pins both architectures with SHA-256 hashes and runs a --version smoke test on install.
Where it broke
The tap lagged the source for a stretch — formula at 1.3.1 while the changelog reached 1.6.0 — meaning users could install stale builds. The changelog also documents a flaky iostat-dependent test that had to be deterministically hardened. Release automation is the open gap.
Next test
Wire release automation so the tap can never lag source again, then publish install telemetry.