posts

Had a discussion recently with my friend Richard Braakman about debugging.

I first started using Python in 1993.

A while I ago I lamented on Mastodon about wanting a place to discuss technical topics online.

I'm starting a new side project: Yuck.

It seems Python is now deprecating the imp standard library module, in favour of importlib.

For the holidays, you could say thank you to some of the people who write free software you use, especially software that isn't hugely popular.

For some time now, I've been using a sort of dependency graph to visualise roadmaps.

I've started the process of retiring from Debian.

This is an idea.

I've been learning Rust lately.

I don't think any of Flatpak, Snappy, traditional Linux distros, non-traditional Linux distros, containers, online services, or other forms of software distribution are a good solution for all users.

I've started my new job.

Parsing Nom seems powerful and useful, but I'm going to skip this chapter for now.

I use Python in a heavily object-oriented manner, but I've learnt to mostly avoid some aspects, such as inheritance.

I'm excited about this.

Error handling is one of the aspects of programming that tends to be most tedious and most error prone.

Python is a "batteris included" language: the standard library that comes with a standard Python installation is quite large.

I now have a rudimentary [roadmap][] for reaching 1.0 of [vmdb2][], my Debian image building tool.

New thing: modules.

Today I'm not reading another chapter.

There's a lot of traits just for reading from files, or really anything that implement those traits.

I've set up a new website for vmdb2, my tool for building Debian images (basically "debootstrap, except in a disk image").

Re-reading Gentle introduction to Rust, chapter 2, "Structs, Enums and Matching".

Re-reading Gentle introduction to Rust (GITR for short), the introduction and Chapter 1, "Basics".

I want to learn the Rust programming language.

I've decided to take a more serious approach to learning [Rust][].

I'm starting a new job in about a month.

In the modern world, a lot of computing happens on other people's computers.

I was watching the Matthew Garret "Heresies" talk from Debconf17 today.

This week's issue of LWN has a quote by Linus Torvalds on translating kernel messages to something else than English.

I've recently made the first release of ick, my CI engine, which was built by ick itself.

I have just made a new release of ick, my CI system.

It gives me no small amount of satisfaction to announce the ALPHA-6 version of ick, my fledgling continuous integration and deployment engine.

I've been slowly writing on would-be novel, Hacker Noir.

"Code smells" are a well-known concept: they're things that make you worried your code is not of good quality, without necessarily being horribly bad in and of themsleves.

This year I've implemented a rudimentary authentication server for work, called Qvisqve.

For the 2016 NaNoWriMo I started writing a novel about software development, "Hacker Noir".

Random crazy Debian idea of today: add support to dpkg so that it uses containers (or namespaces, or whatever works for this) for running package maintainer scripts (pre- and postinst, pre- and postrm), to prevent them from accidentally or maliciously wri…

Another weekend, another big mailing list thread This weekend, those interested in Debian development have been having a discussion on the debian-devel mailing list about "What can Debian do to provide complex applications to its users?".

My company, QvarnLabs Ab, has today released the first alpha version of our new product, Qvisqve.

TL;DR: Ick is a continuous integration or CI system.

In mid-2017, I decided to experiment with using pull-requests (PRs) on Github.

I wrote these when I woke up one night and had trouble getting back to sleep, and spent a while in a very philosophical mood thinking about life, success, and productivity as a programmer.

A unit is a part of your program you can test in isolation.

GDPR is a new EU regulation for privacy.

How do you attract contributors to a new free software project?

This is a difficult announcement to write.

I realised recently that my laptop isn't set up to send TRIM or DISCARD commands to its SSD.

A couple of people objected to having Yakking on Planet Debian, so I've removed it.

In a case of blatant self-promotion, I am going to add the Yakking RSS feed to the Planet Debian aggregation.