We use Internet Relay Chat (IRC) extensively at sourcehut for real-time group chats and one-on-one messaging. The IRC protocol is quite familiar to hackers, who have been using it since the late 80’s. As chat rooms have become more and more popular among teams of both hackers and non-hackers in rece...

npm’s culture presents a major problem for global software security. It’s grossly irresponsible to let dependency trees grow to thousands of dependencies, from vendors you may have never heard of and likely have not critically evaluated, to solve trivial tasks which could have been done from scratch...

Linux distributions? Oh, those things we use to bootstrap our Docker containers? Yeah, those are annoying. What were you complaining about again? The Python community is obsessed with reinventing the wheel, over and over and over and over and over and over again. distutils, setuptools, pip, pipenv, ...

Linux distributions? Oh, those things we use to bootstrap our Docker containers? Yeah, those are annoying. What were you complaining about again?The Python community is obsessed with reinventing the wheel, over and over and over and over and over and over again. distutils, setuptools, pip, pipenv, t...

npm’s culture presents a major problem for global software security. It’s grossly irresponsible to let dependency trees grow to thousands of dependencies, from vendors you may have never heard of and likely have not critically evaluated, to solve trivial tasks which could have been done from scratch...

Hello again! Following a spooky month, we find ourselves again considering the progress of our eternal march towards FOSS world domination. I’ll first address SourceHut briefly: today is the third anniversary of the opening of the public alpha! I have written a longer post for sourcehut.org which I ...

Hello again! Following a spooky month, we find ourselves again considering the progress of our eternal march towards FOSS world domination.I’ll first address SourceHut briefly: today is the third anniversary of the opening of the public alpha! I have written a longer post for sourcehut.org which I e...

Gather around, my friends, for there is another company which thinks we are stupid and we enjoy having our faces spat in. Apollo Federation1 has announced that they will switch to a non-free license. Let’s find out just how much the Elastic license really is going to “protect the community” like the...

Gather around, my friends, for there is another company which thinks we are stupid and we enjoy having our faces spat in. Apollo Federation1 has announced that they will switch to a non-free license. Let’s find out just how much the Elastic license really is going to “protect the community” like the...

Disclaimer: I work for a GitHub competitor. One of GitHub’s “recommended” marketplace features is the “stale” bot. The purpose of this bot is to automatically close GitHub issues after a period of inactivity, 60 days by default. You have probably encountered it yourself in the course of your work. T...

Disclaimer: I work for a GitHub competitor.One of GitHub’s “recommended” marketplace features is the “stale” bot. The purpose of this bot is to automatically close GitHub issues after a period of inactivity, 60 days by default. You have probably encountered it yourself in the course of your work.Thi...

I don’t particularly find myself to be a fan of the SmarterEveryDay YouTube channel, simply for being outside of Destin’s target audience most of the time. I understand that Destin, the channel’s host, is a friendly person and a great asset to his peers, and that he generally strives to do good. Whe...

I don’t particularly find myself to be a fan of the SmarterEveryDay YouTube channel, simply for being outside of Destin’s target audience most of the time. I understand that Destin, the channel’s host, is a friendly person and a great asset to his peers, and that he generally strives to do good. Whe...

Of all the principles of software engineering which has fallen by the wayside in the modern “move fast and break things” mentality of assholes modern software developers, reliability is perhaps the most neglected, along with its cousin, robustness. Almost all software that users encounter in $CURREN...

Of all the principles of software engineering which has fallen by the wayside in the modern “move fast and break things” mentality of assholes modern software developers, reliability is perhaps the most neglected, along with its cousin, robustness. Almost all software that users encounter in $CURREN...

On this dreary morning here in Amsterdam, I’ve made my cup of coffee and snuggled my cat, and so I’m pleased to share some FOSS news with you. Some cool news today! We’re preparing for a new core product launch at sr.ht, cool updates for our secret programming language, plus news for visurf. Simon S...

On this dreary morning here in Amsterdam, I’ve made my cup of coffee and snuggled my cat, and so I’m pleased to share some FOSS news with you. Some cool news today! We’re preparing for a new core product launch at sr.ht, cool updates for our secret programming language, plus news for visurf.Simon Se...

Note: this is a redacted copy of a blog post published on the internal development blog of a new systems programming language. The name of the project and further details are deliberately being kept in confidence until the initial release. You may be able to find it if you look hard enough — you hav...

Note: this is a redacted copy of a blog post published on the internal development blog of a new systems programming language. The name of the project and further details are deliberately being kept in confidence until the initial release. You may be able to find it if you look hard enough — you hav...

I wrote a post some time ago titled Developers shouldn’t distribute their own software, and after a discussion on the sr.ht IRC channel today, the topic seems worthy of renewed mention. Let’s start with this: what exactly is a software distribution, anyway? I use “software distribution” here, rather...

I wrote a post some time ago titled Developers shouldn’t distribute their own software, and after a discussion on the sr.ht IRC channel today, the topic seems worthy of renewed mention. Let’s start with this: what exactly is a software distribution, anyway?I use “software distribution” here, rather ...

The world wide web has become an annoying, ultra-commercialized space. Many websites today are prioritizing the interests of the company behind the domain, at the expense of the user’s experience and well-being. This has been a frustrating problem for several years, but lately there’s been a heartwa...

The world wide web has become an annoying, ultra-commercialized space. Many websites today are prioritizing the interests of the company behind the domain, at the expense of the user’s experience and well-being. This has been a frustrating problem for several years, but lately there’s been a heartwa...

It’s a quiet, foggy morning here in Amsterdam, and here with my fresh mug of coffee and a cuddly cat in my lap, I’d like to share the latest news on my FOSS efforts with you. Grab yourself a warm drink and a cat of your own and let’s get started. First, a new project: visurf. I announced this a few ...

It’s a quiet, foggy morning here in Amsterdam, and here with my fresh mug of coffee and a cuddly cat in my lap, I’d like to share the latest news on my FOSS efforts with you. Grab yourself a warm drink and a cat of your own and let’s get started.First, a new project: visurf. I announced this a few d...

I’ve started a new side project that I would like to share with you: visurf. visurf, or nsvi, is a NetSurf frontend which provides vi-inspired key bindings and a lightweight Wayland UI with few dependencies. It’s still a work-in-progress, and is not ready for general use yet. I’m letting you know ab...

I’ve started a new side project that I would like to share with you: visurf. visurf, or nsvi, is a NetSurf frontend which provides vi-inspired key bindings and a lightweight Wayland UI with few dependencies. It’s still a work-in-progress, and is not ready for general use yet. I’m letting you know ab...

Greetings! It’s shaping up to be a beautiful day here in Amsterdam, and I have found the city much to my liking so far. If you’re in Amsterdam and want to grab a beer sometime, send me an email! I’ve been making a lot of new friends here. Meanwhile, I’ve also enjoyed a noticable increase in my produ...

Greetings! It’s shaping up to be a beautiful day here in Amsterdam, and I have found the city much to my liking so far. If you’re in Amsterdam and want to grab a beer sometime, send me an email! I’ve been making a lot of new friends here. Meanwhile, I’ve also enjoyed a noticable increase in my produ...

Say you’re building a new (compiled) programming language from scratch. You’ll inevitably have to debug programs written in it, and worse, many of these problems will lead you into deep magic, as you uncover problems with your compiler or runtime. And as you find yourself diving into the arcane arts...