Drew DeVault’s blog features sharp commentary on open source, software engineering, programming languages, ethics in tech, and the social impact of technology.
374 articles from this blog
Third part of a series on building a Wayland compositor with wlroots, focusing on setting up the compositor to render client windows.
A developer shares their journey to earning sustainable income from recurring donations for their open source projects, enabling full-time FOSS work.
Second part of a series on building a Wayland compositor from scratch using wlroots, focusing on enabling client connections.
First part of a series on building a Wayland compositor from scratch using the wlroots library, aimed at developers with C experience.
Explains the POSIX shell standard, its advantages for script portability over Bash, and provides basic guidelines for writing portable shell scripts.
Sway developers challenge GNOME's stance on client-side decorations for Wayland, advocating for a negotiated protocol and server-side options.
A breakdown of transaction, platform, and withdrawal fees for popular donation platforms like Patreon, with a calculator tool to help creators.
Argues for using your Linux distro's native package manager over language-specific tools like pip/npm for better system integration and deployment.
A critique of the Unix fork() system call, arguing it's a flawed design that leads to issues like the OOM killer and file descriptor management problems.
Announcement of the wlroots whitepaper release, with blog excerpts on topics like blocking LLMs, Hare language meetups, and Wayland OS development.
A critique of Mozilla's recent decisions to include ads and sponsored content in Firefox, arguing it violates user trust and the browser's core purpose.
A guide to extending smartphone lifespan through DIY repairs, custom ROMs, and choosing user-serviceable hardware.
Explains software portability, emphasizing the importance of standards like POSIX for running code across many systems and fostering innovation.
Sway developer explains why future versions will drop Nvidia proprietary driver support, criticizing Nvidia's lack of open standards support.
Announces sway 0.15-rc1 and the upcoming 1.0 release, detailing the migration to the new wlroots library for the Wayland compositor.
An analysis of Hacker News moderation tools and practices, based on data scraped from the site's API.
A developer critiques modern software complexity, arguing that overengineered tools like Docker and Gulp create more problems than they solve.
Explains why complex regexes are often wrong and unmaintainable, advocating for simpler, more robust validation methods.
August 2017 update on Sway, an i3-compatible Wayland compositor, covering new features like tray icons, bug fixes, and project stats.
A technical article discussing the problem of link rot on the internet and advocating for personal archiving strategies using tools like wget and cron jobs.
