My code style

Thoughts on performance & optimization

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 software developers today, even senior ones, are approaching this problem poorly.

Centrally, I believe that you cannot effectively optimize a system which you do not understand. Say, for example, that you’re searching for a member of a linked list, which is an O(n) operation. You know this can be improved by switching from...

Fucking laptops

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 driven by the upstream Linux kernel. In fact, the hardware is so well understood that I have successfully used almost all of the laptop’s features on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Minix, Haiku, and Plan 9. Plan fucking 9. It can run coreboot, too. The back of the laptop...

Status update, February 2020

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 the temperature is too high? We’ll see how it fares when it’s done. In the meanwhile, let’s get you up to speed on my free software projects.

First, big thanks to everyone who stopped by to say “hello” at FOSDEM! Putting...

Dependencies and maintainers

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 representatives of Microsoft and GitHub and discusses whether or not there is a sustainability problem in open source (link). The content of the talk, interpreted within the framework in which it was presented, was moderately interesting. It was more fascinating...

KnightOS was an interesting operating system

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 starry eyed empty promises to themselves that one day they’ll do one of those big refactorings we’ve been planning… for 4 or 5 years now.

Still, it was a really interesting operating system which was working under some challenging constraints, and overcame them to offer a rather nice Unix-like environment, with a...

The Polygons of Another World: GBA

How Another World was implemented on Game Boy Advance!

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...

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...