The happinesses and stresses of full-time FOSS work

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 while. I do have some thoughts that I’d like to share about what kind of stresses I’ve dealt with as a FOSS maintainer, and how I’ve managed (or often mismanaged) it.

February will mark one year that I’ve been working on self-directed free software projects full-time. I was planning on writing an optimistic retrospective article...

The Polygons of Another World: SNES

How Another World was implemented on Super Nintendo!

A philosophy of project governance

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 project governance which I believe is lightweight, effective, and inclusive.

I hold the following axioms to be true:

And the following is true of individuals within those systems:

Status update, January 2020

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 being there again this year. I hope to see you there! I’ll be hosting another small session for SourceHut and aerc users where I’ll take questions, demo some new stuff, and give out stickers.

In Wayland news, the upcoming Sway 1.3 release is getting very close - rc3 is planned to ship later...

BitTorrent bencode format tools

Following up on "Hello world"

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 world” article was a lot of work to put together — frustrating work — by the time I had finished collecting numbers, I was exhausted and didn’t pay much mind to putting context to them. This left a lot of it open to interpretation, and a lot of those interpretations didn’t give the benefit of the...

The Polygons of Another World: Genesis

How Another World was implemented on Sega Genesis/Megadrive!

Hello world

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 language.

bits 64
section .text
global _start
_start:
	mov rdx, len
	mov rsi, msg
	mov rdi, 1
	mov rax, 1
	syscall

	mov rdi, 0
	mov rax, 60
	syscall

section .rodata
msg: db "hello world", 10
len: equ $-msg

Most languages do a whole lot of other crap other than printing out “hello world”, even if that’s all you asked for.

The Polygons of Another World: PC DOC

How Another World was implemented on PC DOS!

The Polygons of Another World: Atari ST

How Another World was implemented on Atari ST!