Disclaimer: I am the founder of a company which competes with GitHub. However, I still use tools like GitHub, GitLab, and so on, as part of regular contributions to projects all over the FOSS ecosystem. I don’t dislike GitHub, and I use it frequently in my daily workflow.GitHub is rolling out a new ...

To Senator Bob Casey, I’m writing this open letter. As your constituent, someone who voted for you in 2018, and an expert in software technology, I am disappointed in your support of the EARN IT Act. I am aware that encryption is a challenging technology to understand, even for us software engineers...

To Senator Bob Casey, I’m writing this open letter.As your constituent, someone who voted for you in 2018, and an expert in software technology, I am disappointed in your support of the EARN IT Act. I am aware that encryption is a challenging technology to understand, even for us software engineers,...

The sun has an influence on its surroundings. One of these is in the form of small particles that are constantly ejected from the sun in all directions, which exerts an outward pressure, creating an expanding sphere of particles that moves away from the sun. These particles are the solar wind. As th...

The sun has an influence on its surroundings. One of these is in the form of small particles that are constantly ejected from the sun in all directions, which exerts an outward pressure, creating an expanding sphere of particles that moves away from the sun. These particles are the solar wind. As th...

The idea that programmers ought to or ought not to be called “software engineers” is a contentious one. How you approach optimization and performance is one metric which can definitely push my evaluation of a developer towards the engineering side. Unfortunately, I think that a huge number of softwa...

The idea that programmers ought to or ought not to be called “software engineers” is a contentious one. How you approach optimization and performance is one metric which can definitely push my evaluation of a developer towards the engineering side. Unfortunately, I think that a huge number of softwa...

The best laptop ever made is the ThinkPad X200, and I have two of them. The caveats are: I get only 2-3 hours of battery life even with conservative use; and it struggles to deal with 1080p videos. The integrated GPU, Bluetooth and WiFi, internal sensors, and even the fingerprint reader can all be d...

The best laptop ever made is the ThinkPad X200, and I have two of them. The caveats are: I get only 2-3 hours of battery life even with conservative use; and it struggles to deal with 1080p videos.The integrated GPU, Bluetooth and WiFi, internal sensors, and even the fingerprint reader can all be dr...

Today I thought it’d try out something new: I have an old family recipe simmering on the stove right now, but instead of beef I’m trying out impossible beef. It cooked up a bit weird — it doesn’t brown up in the same way I expect of ground beef, and it made a lot more fond than I expected. Perhaps t...

Today I thought it’d try out something new: I have an old family recipe simmering on the stove right now, but instead of beef I’m trying out impossible beef. It cooked up a bit weird — it doesn’t brown up in the same way I expect of ground beef, and it made a lot more fond than I expected. Perhaps t...

I’m 34,018 feet over the Atlantic at the moment, on my way home from FOSDEM. It was as always a lovely event, with far too many events of interest for any single person to consume. One of the few talks I was able to attend1 left a persistent worm of thought in my brain. This talk was put on by repre...

I’m 34,018 feet over the Atlantic at the moment, on my way home from FOSDEM. It was as always a lovely event, with far too many events of interest for any single person to consume. One of the few talks I was able to attend1 left a persistent worm of thought in my brain. This talk was put on by repre...

KnightOS is an operating system I started writing about 10 years ago, for Texas Instruments line of z80 calculators — the TI-73, TI-83+, TI-84+, and similar calculators are supported. It still gets the rare improvements, but these days myself and most of the major contributors are just left with sta...

KnightOS is an operating system I started writing about 10 years ago, for Texas Instruments line of z80 calculators — the TI-73, TI-83+, TI-84+, and similar calculators are supported. It still gets the rare improvements, but these days myself and most of the major contributors are just left with sta...

In the past few days, several free software maintainers have come out to discuss the stresses of their work. Though the timing was suggestive, my article last week on the philosophy of project governance was, at best, only tangentially related to this topic - I had been working on that article for a...

In the past few days, several free software maintainers have come out to discuss the stresses of their work. Though the timing was suggestive, my article last week on the philosophy of project governance was, at best, only tangentially related to this topic - I had been working on that article for a...

I’ve been in the maintainer role for dozens of projects for a while now, and have moderated my fair share of conflicts. I’ve also been on the other side, many times, as a minor contributor watching or participating in conflict within other projects. Over the years, I’ve developed an approach to proj...

I’ve been in the maintainer role for dozens of projects for a while now, and have moderated my fair share of conflicts. I’ve also been on the other side, many times, as a minor contributor watching or participating in conflict within other projects. Over the years, I’ve developed an approach to proj...

I forgot to write this post this morning, and I’m on cup 3 of coffee while knee-deep in some arcane work with tarballs in Python. Forgive the brevity of this introduction. Let’s get right into the status update. First of all, FOSDEM 2020 is taking place on February 1st and 2nd, and I’m planning on b...

I forgot to write this post this morning, and I’m on cup 3 of coffee while knee-deep in some arcane work with tarballs in Python. Forgive the brevity of this introduction. Let’s get right into the status update.First of all, FOSDEM 2020 is taking place on February 1st and 2nd, and I’m planning on be...

This is a follow-up to my last article, Hello world, which is easily the most negatively received article I’ve written — a remarkable feat for someone who’s written as much flame bait as me. Naturally, the fault lies with the readers. All jokes aside, I’ll try to state my point better. The “Hello wo...

This is a follow-up to my last article, Hello world, which is easily the most negatively received article I’ve written — a remarkable feat for someone who’s written as much flame bait as me. Naturally, the fault lies with the readers.All jokes aside, I’ll try to state my point better. The “Hello wor...

Let’s say you ask your programming language to do the simplest possible task: print out “hello world”. Generally this takes two syscalls: write and exit. The following assembly program is the ideal Linux x86_64 program for this purpose. A perfect compiler would emit this hello world program for any ...

Let’s say you ask your programming language to do the simplest possible task: print out “hello world”. Generally this takes two syscalls: write and exit. The following assembly program is the ideal Linux x86_64 program for this purpose. A perfect compiler would emit this hello world program for any ...

There are many tools for managing your dotfiles - user-specific configuration files. GNU stow is an example. I’ve tried a few solutions over the years, but I settled on a very simple system several years ago which has served me very well in the time since: my $HOME is a git repository. This reposito...

There are many tools for managing your dotfiles - user-specific configuration files. GNU stow is an example. I’ve tried a few solutions over the years, but I settled on a very simple system several years ago which has served me very well in the time since: my $HOME is a git repository. This reposito...

tl;dr: Holy shit! This is the phone I have always wanted. I have never been this excited about the mobile sector before. However: the software side is totally absent — phone calls are very dubious, SMS is somewhat dubious, LTE requires some hacks, and everything will have to be written from the grou...

tl;dr: Holy shit! This is the phone I have always wanted. I have never been this excited about the mobile sector before. However: the software side is totally absent — phone calls are very dubious, SMS is somewhat dubious, LTE requires some hacks, and everything will have to be written from the grou...

It’s December 15th and it still hasn’t snowed here. Why did I move to this godforsaken den of unholy heat and rain? I think I have chosen a latitude just southerly enough to deprive me of the climate I yearn for. I take some comfort in the knowledge that I’m travelling home to see the family in a co...