Software engineers solve problems

Software engineers solve problems. A problem you may have encountered is, for example, “this function has a bug”, and you’re probably already more or less comfortable solving these problems. Here are some other problems you might encounter on the way:

I’ve met many engineers who, when standing at the base of this mountain, conclude that the summit is too far away and clearly not...

Status update, August 2020

Greetings! Today is another rainy day here in Philadelphia, which rather sours my plans of walking over to the nearby cafe to order some breakfast to-go. But I am tired, and if I’m going to make it to the end of this blog post in one piece, I’m gonna need a coffee. brb.

Hey, that was actually pretty refreshing. It’s just drizzling, and the rain is nice and cool. Alright, here goes! What’s new? I’ll leave the Wayland news for Simon Ser’s blog this month - he’s been working on some exciting stuff. The BARE encoding announced last month has received some great feedback and refinements, and there...

Web browsers need to stop

Enough is enough.

The web and web browsers have become Lovecraftian horrors of an unprecedented scale. They’ve long since left “scope creep” territory and entered “oh my god please just stop” territory, and are trucking on through to hitherto unexplored degrees of obscene scope. And we don’t want what they’re selling. Google pitches garbage like AMP1 and pushing dubious half-assed specs like Web Components. Mozilla just fired everyone relevant2 to focus on crap no one asked for like Pocket, and fad nonsense like a paid VPN service and virtual reality tech.3 [2020-08-14: It has been pointed out that the VR team was also fired.]

Microsoft gave up entirely. Mozilla just...

I want to contribute to your project, how do I start?

I get this question a lot! The answer is usually… don’t. If you already know what you want to do, then the question doesn’t need to be asked.1 But, if you don’t already know what you want to do, then your time might be better spent elsewhere!

The best contributors are always intrinsically motivated. Some contributors show up every now and then who appreciate the value the project gives to them and want to give something back. Their gratitude is definitely appreciated2, but these kinds of contributions tend to require more effort from the maintainers, and don’t generally lead to recurring contributions. Projects you already like are less likely...

pkg.go.dev is more concerned with Google's interests than good engineering

pkg.go.dev sucks. It’s certainly prettier than godoc.org, but under the covers, it’s a failure of engineering characteristic of the Google approach.

Go is a pretty good programming language. I have long held that this is not attributable to Google’s stewardship, but rather to a small number of language designers and a clear line of influences which is drawn entirely from outside of Google — mostly from Bell Labs. pkg.go.dev provides renewed support for my argument: it has all the hallmarks of Google crapware and none of the deliberate, good engineering work that went into Go’s design.

It was apparent from the start that this is what it would...

Skill levels in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)

The falsehoods of anti-AGPL propaganda

Google is well-known for forbidding the use of software using the GNU Affero General Public License, commonly known as “AGPL”. Google is also well-known for being the subject of cargo-culting by fad startups. Unfortunately, this means that they are susceptible to what is ultimately anti-AGPL propaganda from Google, with little to no basis in fact.

Obligatory: I’m not a lawyer; this is for informational purposes only.

In truth, the terms of the AGPL are pretty easy to comply with. The basic obligations of the AGPL which set it apart from other licenses are as follows:

Status update, July 2020

Hello again! Another month of FOSS development behind us, and we’re back again to share the results. I took a week off at the end of June, so my progress this month is somewhat less than usual. Regardless, I have some updates for you, mainly in the domain of SourceHut work.

But before we get to that, let’s go over this month’s small victories. One was the invention of the BARE message format, which I wrote a blog post about if you want to learn more. Since that article, five new implementations have appeared from various authors: Rust, Python, JavaScript, D, and Zig.

I also wrote a couple of...

March 2nd, 1943

It’s March 2nd, 1943. The user asks your software to schedule a meeting with Acmecorp at “9 AM on the first Monday of next month”.

[6:17:45] homura ~ $ cal -3 2 March 1943
    February 1943          March 1943            April 1943
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa  Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa  Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
    1  2  3  4  5  6   ...


						
						Drew DeVault's blog
						

							Posted at 2020-07-14 00:00:00 | Software | read on
						
					

General-purpose OS, special-purpose OS, and now: vendor-purpose OS

There have, historically, been two kinds of operating systems: general-purpose, and special-purpose. These roles are defined by the function they serve for the user. Examples of general-purpose operating systems include Unix (Linux, BSD, etc), Solaris, Haiku, Plan 9, and so on. These are well-suited to general computing tasks, and are optimized to solve the most problems possible, perhaps at the expense of those in some niche domains. Special-purpose operating systems serve those niche domains, and are less suitable for general computing. Examples of these include FreeRTOS, Rockbox, Genode, and so on.

These terms distinguish operating systems by the problems they solve for the user. However, a disturbing trend is...