Patches welcome

Happy new year! This is always a weird “holiday” for me, since all of the fun happened last night. Today is just kind of… I guess a chance for everyone to sober up before work tomorrow? It does tend to invite a sense of reflection and is the ideal time to plan for the year ahead. One of my goals in 2019 is to change more people’s thinking about the open source community and what it means to count among their number.

I think there’s a certain mode of thinking which lends itself to a more productive free software community and a happier free software contributor. Free software...

Introducing ThinMusic

At the peak of my career as a software engineer, I spent most of my free time either playing video games or reading books about engineering management. These days, my day job is mostly engineering management, and so I find myself carving out play-time to write some code (and of course, still indulge in video games).

A result of that play-time over this winter break merits broader sharing than my usual side project. I built a web player for Apple Music, called ThinMusic, to scratch two of my itches:

Anatomy of a shell

I’ve been contributing where I can to Simon Ser’s mrsh project, a work-in-progress strictly POSIX shell implementation. I worked on some small mrsh features during my holiday travels and it’s in the forefront of my mind, so I’d like to share some of its design details with you.

There are two main components to a shell: parsing and execution. mrsh uses a simple recursive descent parser to generate an AST (Abstract Syntax Tree, or an in-memory model of the structure of the parsed source). This design was chosen to simplify the code and avoid dependencies like flex/bison, and is a good choice given that performance isn’t critical for...

How DOOM fire was made

How the playstation and Nintendo 64 version of DOOM implemented fire.

Deciphering the postcard sized raytracer

How Andrew Kensler did it again and authored a breathtaking path tracer fitting on a postcard.

Porting Alpine Linux to RISC-V

I recently received my HiFive Unleashed, after several excruciating months of waiting, and it’s incredibly cool. For those unaware, the HiFive Unleashed is the first consumer-facing Linux-capable RISC-V hardware. For anyone who’s still lost, RISC-V is an open, royalty-free instruction set architecture, and the HiFive is an open CPU implementing it. And here it is on my dining room table:

This board is cool. I’m working on making this hardware available to builds.sr.ht users in the next few months, where I intend to use it to automate the remainder of the Alpine Linux port and make it available to any other operating systems (including non-Linux) and userspace software which are interested in...

How the Dreamcast copy protection was defeated

How the Dreamcast copy protection was defeated!

Game Engine Black Book: DOOM

The Game Engine Black Book: DOOM is out!

Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D, 2nd Edition

The second edition of the Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D is out.

How to abandon a FLOSS project

It’s no secret that maintaining free and open source software is often a burdensome and thankless job. I empathise with maintainers who lost interest in a project, became demotivated by the endless demands of users, or are no longer blessed with enough free time. Whatever the reason, FLOSS work is volunteer work, and you’re free to stop volunteering at any time.

In my opinion, there are two good ways to abandon a project: the fork it option and the hand-off option. The former is faster and easier, and you can pick this if you want to wash your hands of the project ASAP, but has a larger effect...