Status update, August 2022

It is a blessedly cool morning here in Amsterdam. I was busy moving house earlier this month, so this update is a bit quieter than most.

For a fun off-beat project this month, I started working on a GameBoy emulator written in Hare. No promises on when it will be functional or how much I plan on working on it – just doing it for fun. In more serious Hare news, I have implemented Thread-Local Storage (TLS) for qbe, our compiler backend. Hare’s standard library does not support multi-threading, but I needed this for Helios, whose driver library does support threads. It will also presumably be of use...

How I wish I could organize my thoughts

I keep a pen & notebook on my desk, which I make liberal use of to jot down my thoughts. It works pretty well: ad-hoc todo lists, notes on problems I’m working on, tables, flowcharts, etc. It has some limitations, though. Sharing anything out of my notebook online is an awful pain in the ass. I can’t draw a straight line to save my life, so tables and flowcharts are a challenge. No edits, either, so lots of crossed-out words and redrawn or rewritten pages. And of course, my handwriting sucks and I can type much more efficiently than I can write. I wish this was a...

Analog vs. digital games

Conciseness

Conciseness is often considered a virtue among hackers and software engineers. FOSS maintainers in particular generally prefer to keep bug reports, questions on mailing lists, discussions in IRC channels, and so on, close to the point and with minimal faff. It’s not considered impolite to skip the formalities — quite the opposite. So: keep your faffery to a minimum. A quick “thanks!” at the end of a discussion will generally suffice. And, when someone is being direct with you, don’t interpret it as a slight: simply indulge in the blissful freedom of a discussion absent of faffery.

The past and future of open hardware

They say a sucker is born every day, and at least on the day of my birth, that certainly may have been true. I have a bad habit of spending money on open hardware projects that ultimately become vaporware or seriously under-deliver on their expectations. In my ledger are EOMA68, DragonBox Pyra, the Jolla Tablet — which always had significant non-free components — and the Mudita Pure, though I did successfully receive a refund for the latter two.1

There are some success stories, though. My Pine64 devices work great — though they have non-free components — and I have a HiFive Unmatched that I’m reasonably pleased with. Raspberry...

Code review at the speed of email

https://spacepub.space/videos/embed/385c414a-2bdc-4bf3-82a0-76fcb15093e9

I’m a big proponent of the email workflow for patch submission and code review. I have previously published some content (How to use git.sr.ht’s send-email feature, Forks & pull requests vs email, git-send-email.io) which demonstrates the contributor side of this workflow, but it’s nice to illustrate the advantages of the maintainer workflow as well. For this purpose, I’ve recorded a short video demonstrating how I manage code review as an email-oriented maintainer.

Disclaimer: I am the founder of SourceHut, a platform built on this workflow which competes with platforms like GitHub and GitLab. This article’s perspective is biased.

This blog post provides additional material to...

Все должны пойти на демосцену

Да, именно так должен называться анонс фестиваля компьютерного искусства и самодельной электроники, проходящего в этом году, 20-21 августа, неподалеку от Санкт-Петербурга. Название для анонса мне посоветовал человек с никнеймом @Superogue - основатель и ведущий онлайн-фестиваля демосцены Lovebyte. Он, в свою очередь, приводит в пример анонс фестиваля Outline 2022, который имел похожий заголовок: Everyone Should Go To A Demo Party.

Потому что демосцена - это круто.

Status update, July 2022

Hello there! It’s been a hot July week in Amsterdam, and I expect hotter days are still to come. I wish air conditioning was more popular in Europe, but alas. This month of FOSS development enjoyed a lot of small improvements in a lot of different projects.

For Hare, I have introduced a number of improvements. I wrote a new standard library module for string templates, strings::template, and a new third-party library for working with pixel buffers, pixbuf. The templating is pretty simple — as is typical for the standard library — but allows a fairly wide range of formatting options. We’ll be extending this a little bit more...

The Fediverse can be pretty toxic

Mastodon, inspired by GNU social, together with Pleroma, form the most popular components of what we know as the “Fediverse” today. All of them are, in essence, federated, free software Twitter clones, interoperable with each other via the ActivityPub protocol.

In many respects, the Fediverse is a liberating force for good. Its federated design distributes governance and costs across many independent entities, something I view as a very strong design choice. Its moderation tools also do a pretty good job of keeping neo-nazis out of your feeds and providing a comfortable space to express yourself in, especially if your form of expression is maligned by society. Large groups of...

I dislike dividends