What is a fork, really, and how GitHub changed its meaning

The fork button on GitHub - with the little number next to it for depositing dopamine into your brain - is a bit misleading. GitHub co-opted the meaning of “fork” to trick you into participating in their platform more. They did this in a well-intentioned way, for the sake of their pull requests feature, but ultimately this design is self-serving and causes some friction when contributors venture out of their GitHub sandbox and into the rest of the software development ecosystem. Let’s clarify what “fork” really means, and what we do without GitHub’s concept of one - for it is in this difference that we truly discover how...

ToxCon 2019

This October the Tox developer community will be holding its third annual conference at Metalab in the heart of Vienna, Austria. The event will be 3 full days, from Friday, October 11th to Sunday, October 13th.

We will talk about Tox, and other security related and interesting topics. If you would like to attend, meet the Tox devs, do some live hacking, or just socialize — get a free ticket and reserve a T-shirt. You can find the exact address on your ticket.

Want to give a talk about your project? Please apply here!

If you have any questions about booking, travel arrangements,...

Self-encrypted cache structure

Health

When I started this blog in 1999, it contained mostly personal stuff. Blogs were a new thing, Facebook and Twitter were five respectively seven years away, and it felt appropriate to me. Later on, I switched to english and added more about my professional projects – hence the focus moved to rather technical posts. Personal matters felt more appropriate on Facebook. In an attempt to gain back control about my content, I recently moved the blog from Wordpress to Lektor. The next step for me is reintroducing personal matters. Not many, but now and then. I won't bother with adding...

Game Engine Black Book update

The Game Engine Black Books have been updated. Free pdfs, high-quality prints, and source code are available.

Status update, May 2019

This month, it seems the most exciting developments again come from the realm of email. I’ve got cool email-related news to share for aerc, lists.sr.ht, and todo.sr.ht, and many cool developments in my other projects to share.

Let’s start with lists.sr.ht: I have broken ground on the web-based patch review tools! I promised these features when I started working on sourcehut, to make the email-based workflow more enticing to those who would rather work on the web. Basically, this gives us a Github or Gerrit-esque review UI for patches which arrive on the mailing list. Thanks to a cool library Simon Ser wrote for me… almost a year ago…...

Webcast: Reviewing git & mercurial patches with email

With the availability of new resources like git-send-email.io, I’ve been working on making the email-based workflow more understandable and accessible to the world. One thing that’s notably missing from this tutorial, however, is the maintainer side of the work. I intend to do a full write-up in the future, but for now I thought it’d be helpful to clarify my workflow a bit with a short webcast. In this video, I narrate my workflow as I review a few sourcehut patches and participate in some dicsussions.

Links:

Also check out...

Calculating your donation's value following Patreon's fee changes

In January 2018, I wrote a blog post which included a fee calculator. Patreon changes their fee model tomorrow, and it’s time for an updated calculator. I’m grandfathered into the old fees, so not much has changed for me, but I want to equip Patreon users - creators and supporters - with more knowledge of how their money is moving through the platform.

Patreon makes money by siphoning some money off the top of a donation flow between supporters and creators. Because of the nature of its business (a private, VC-backed corporation), the siphon’s size and semantics are prone to change in undesirable ways, since VC’s expect infinite growth and...

Announcing Wio: A clone of Plan 9's Rio for Wayland

For a few hours here and there over the past few months, I’ve been working on a side project: Wio. I’ll just let the (3 minute) screencast do the talking first:

Note: this video begins with several seconds of grey video. This is normal.

In short, Wio is a Wayland compositor based on wlroots which has a similar look and feel to Plan 9’s Rio desktop. It works by running each application in its own nested Wayland compositor, based on Cage - yet another wlroots-based Wayland compositor. I used Cage in last week’s RDP article, but here’s another cool use-case for it.

The behavior this allows for (each window...

The "shut up and get back to work" coding style guide

So you’re starting a new website, and you open the first CSS file. What style do you use? Well, you hate indenting with spaces passionately. You know tabs are right because they’re literally made for this, and they’re only one byte, and these god damn spaces people with their bloody spacebars…

Shut up and use spaces. That’s how CSS is written1. And you, mister web programmer, coming out of your shell and dipping your toes into the world of Real Programming, writing your first Golang program: use tabs, jerk. There’s only one principle that matters in coding style: don’t rock the boat. Just do whatever the most common...