Riffing on a new flake parts project, Le Grille. Similar to Shell Game, but it also tries to keep the treefmt config in sync. Adding a language should add not just a devshell, but a treefmt config using the same tool versions. Also takes care of some other boilerplate, like deadnix+statix+nixfmt […]

I wish I could share the ISO's performance of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony as a timeline cleanse. If you've got about 90 minutes and need a cleanse, find a recording wherever you find music. #indysymphony #classicalmusic

Friday night open source, 2021: work on libraries with thousands of downloads that serve millions of users Friday night open source, 2026: helping an OpenBSD user get past my scraper defenses to read my mediocre website, wondering if we're the last two humans on the Internet

Tech is making me cranky lately. Here are two dogs watching winter slowly recede.

"Engineering was never about the code, it's about the outcomes" is like "basketball was never about the rebounds, it's about the outcomes". Absolutely. And if you stop practicing boxing out and replace your frontcourt with three foot tall robots, you're not going to like the outcome.

[Drives a hot dog-shaped car through the window.] [Stumbles out wearing a hot dog costume.] Here's what we plan to do for maintainers! https://github.blog/open-source/maintainers/welcome-to-the-eternal-september-of-open-source-heres-what-we-plan-to-do-for-maintainers/ #github

**The F8s Manifesto** F8s is how we move our profession beyond software engineering. [fart noises]

Job hunting sucks. Especially in 2026. If you apply and submit an authentic code sample, however rough, I will reciprocate by making time for an interview. Slop wastes both our time.

People keep saying "the things you learn now won't be useful in six months" and "you're falling behind." I've focused on more durable skills and feel pretty confident they'll be needed to clean up the mess.

My new motto is RIIR, RIOC.¹ ¹ - Rewrite It In Rust, Rewrite It On Codeberg.

It's -3°F outside, furnace is out, and no appointments until Monday. Not a great weekend to be an alopetic dog or a tropical fish around here.

Since Claude respects AGENTS.md about as well as it respects most else, it receives dedicated instructions. https://codeberg.org/rossabaker/no-agents.md/src/commit/main/CLAUDE.md

Spent entirely too long tracing a waybar quirk down to the fact my canonical time zone identifier has three components. I went as far as to write some C++ and step through gdb. The root causes, one technical and one legislative: * https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=122567 * […]

This pianist memorized Rachmaninov's entire third concerto, and I can't even remember where I parked. Great show, though. #indysymphony

My wife bought this sweatshirt on a campus visit in 1996. She doesn't care about football. It was just cold. I met her the next year. I kept the shirt. I'd bring it out after IU's infrequent and modest victories, and she would make fun of it and me […] [Original post on social.rossabaker.com]

I had forgotten how nice it feels to break my window manager and be stuck in a tty. I should get back to doing this more often.

I tried out @ross's "kbbl-cli" webmention tool (https://codeberg.org/rossabaker/kbbl#headline-2) and it works great! It retrieves the webmention endpoint URL from the target and uses that to send the mention. Note that since there are multiple crates in the repo, you'll have to install it like […]

I regret to report that I'm back to customizing my fonts. This one's an opinionated derivation of Iosevka's take on IBM Plex. And it has its own site. https://cromulent-fonts.rossabaker.com/ #fonts #iosevka #ibmplex

Had too much time to contemplate last night while taking down Christmas decorations, so I jumped on the Top4 bandwagon. Follow the tag for more unsubstantiated hot takes. https://rossabaker.com/tags/top4/ #top4

Went to a trivia night where one of the answers was Bolivia, and nobody appreciated my Wu-Tang quote. I hope the culture improves in 2026.

Mi sitio web en español ahora atrae spam de SEO. ¡Los alemanes se están quedando atrás!

Apologies for adding to the year-in-review din, but the ancient birdsite tradition of listing the languages we worked in that year was a favorite, made better now that I can to comment on each. I had some fun in 2025. https://rossabaker.com/blog/code-2025/ Please join the hashtag and add your […]

Looking for non-EU citizens who chose the EUPL. It has many of the properties I'm looking for, and self-declares itself a global license, but I'm not sure. Am I being sensibly cautious or American exceptionalist? #licensing #eupl

Microsoft's "north star" for porting C and C++ to Rust with AI is "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code." If that engineer has no other responsibilities, that is about 0.6 lines per second to review... or not. May what is to come reflect on Microsoft and not Rust. #microsoft #ai

Was flipping through the radio dial like an old man, and stumbled onto a revival of WNAP, "The Buzzard." When I moved here, that was the corporate classic rock station. Now it's commercial-free oldies station, but commercial-free, with DJs. Nice to find stations like this still exist. #indiana […]

Thinking about licensing again. I'm torn between the MPL and EUPL. I'm mostly after an MPL that closes the SaaS loophole: use my crates and jars where you like, but if you improve my work, share alike. This sounds like the EUPL, except I can't so easily tell, less explain to a skittish corporate […]

Erinnert sich noch jemand an ein Poster mit einem New Kid on the Block vor der Berliner Mauer? Darauf stand: „Ich bin hübsch, du bist hübsch, er ist hübsch…“? Mein Deutschkurs an einer amerikanischen Schule hatte so eins, ungefähr 1993.

Look at me, getting the Christmas lights up before the solstice.

I know several Scala developers taking an interest in Rust right now. I'm starting over my reading of The Rust Programming Language and blogging reactions from the perspective of a Scala developer. Hope this helps people on a similar path to mine: - Series […]

duetexpertd is taking over 100% of my CPU. It is apparently a process for syncing to iCloud. It can't be turned off. I don't even have an Apple account. Free software is the freedom to paddle when you're up shit creek, and the paddle isn't available on the Mac. #macos

When the LLM is good enough for your customer service but not good enough for your sentiment analysis:

It varies by latitude, but up here around 40°N, today is the earliest sunset of the year. Better news than the solstice, if you like to be outdoors after work.

Ich dachte, heute Abend wäre Krampusnacht. Ich habe sie verpasst!

I'm just going to start posting my entire site-lisp directory next to CLAUDE.md and we're going to see who blinks first.

I did not anticipate spending part of this evening admiring Berkshire Hathaway's web design, but here we are. Thanks, @tantek.com! https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

I have begun my 2025 December Adventure. KBBL will be an implementation of Webmention in Rust. Tonight was just the repo setup. Follow along: - https://rossabaker.com/series/december-adventure-2025/ - https://codeberg.org/rossabaker/kbbl #decemberadventure #webmention

Tried to document Iocaine on the IndieWeb wiki, but I can't log in because IndieLogin is flagged by Iocaine for being a fake Firefox and thus served a garbage response instead of the links that power the login. Oops. https://github.com/aaronpk/indielogin.com/issues/135 #iocaine #indieweb

#dachshund #Autumn

I don't write Zig, but I continue to be impressed with how it's managed. https://ziglang.org/news/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg/ #giveupgithub #zig

I'm looking into the Zig programming language, and I found this on the language designer's blog. I always appreciate seeing other people being as cranky as I am about rent-seeking and the aggressive push for LLM coding: “In this case it's even more suspicious because the company that bills you […]

I have a long track record of patiently mentoring new Open Source developers. AI sloppeteers should be aggressively blocked and banned. How will they learn? Open Source is a big world. By being consistently blocked and banned for slopping, maybe they'll learn not to slop. And either way, the […]

Today in review: - After a few weeks, Rust is starting to click. - After a few years, Docker is still utterly baffling.

This Claude guy needs to be put on a PIP.

The port of Basic Computer Games to multiple languages makes a lovely training corpus for Iocaine to protect your web servers and give the AI scrapers a tummyache. NixOS setting and example in the paste. https://paste.rossabaker.com/ross/d848ac45ba5b476daac56c525e66b9f7 […]

Upgrading to Iocaine 3, and got a persistent exit code 216 from Caddy. It seems that the iocaine.service must be started before caddy.service, which is not true of other services I reverse proxy with Caddy. Curious. https://paste.rossabaker.com/ross/83475e4a1d1b4006b082453aefa93287 #caddy […]

Seeing open source and privacy companies having Discord as there support channel feels like a vegan community meeting at a steak house for events.

There's a good song to be written about learning of an artist's death via a clickbait headline, and Todd Snider would have been my first choice to write it. RIP.

Remember how nice getting your project found and receiving pull requests on GitHub used to feel? Still feels that way on Codeberg. #codeberg

Took a detour from my Rust studies to artisanally handcraft a frontend for How Many Nines. It is unmistakably the frontend of a backend developer. https://hm9s.rossabaker.com/