Welcome to my blog!

As an avid contriubtor to open source, both in my own repositories and others', I interact with Git a lot and need to submit changes to those projects. If one such project happens to be on GitHub, then those changes need to go in a standalone branch before submission. Following up from my previous articles, I’m finally at a command I’ve been very excited to share about. It took a few tries to nail this down but ever since I did, it’s been indispensable....

As an avid contriubtor to open source, both in my own repositories and others', I interact with Git a lot and need to submit changes to those projects. If one such project happens to be on GitHub, then those changes need to go in a standalone branch before submission. This is a very light addition on top of yesterday’s post where we defined git-newbranchname but this one has just as much joined its spot in my toolbox so I wanted to give it its own moment (URL) to shine....

As an avid contriubtor to open source, both in my own repositories and others', I interact with Git a lot and need to submit changes to those projects. If one such project happens to be on GitHub, then those changes need to go in a standalone branch before submission. For single file changes the GitHub on-site editor is often sufficient however the branch name will be something like patch-1, patch-2, etc and incrementing up as you make more....

Hey y’all, in our last installment I showed off the first “real application” coming out of Magnolia Desktop and today I wanted to show some screenshots for a new app aptly named ImageViewer. Just like many other operating systems I feel that a user should not have to open a web browser in order to view the pictures on their computer. To this end we now have the ImageViewer program. There is still much work to do but as of today it contains fully custom working implementations for BMP, QOI, TGA, PNG, and JPG....

https://mastodon.social/@nektro/110857823907433264 I’ve been working on a nice catalog of demos for Magnolia Desktop, but it now has reached a point where I made real app: Calculator This has been a long time coming since my first introductory post to Magnolia Desktop over a year ago both because a lot of life happened and other projects took precendence for a while. A myriad of other demos have been added in that time and if you check mastodon I posted that about a month ago....

As the developer of a source package manager (for the reference point of this article) rather than one of a system package manager (eg apt, apk, pacman, nix) it is very easy for me to prioritize the users who only build their apps from source by running zigmod fetch and zig build, either locally or in CI. Zig already makes a lot of headway in ensuring this is a just-works experience and Zigmod fits in snuggly....

One of the biggest factors in how intimidating something is is how little you know about it. At the time of starting this project I consider myself a bit of GitHub expert and wanted to try contributing to projects that I used all the time but whose development processes were totally unknown to me. As it happens this actually started as an article about contributing to Linux and I was inspired to do so after seeing Andreas Kling’s FIXME Roulette series on his YouTube channel where he deep-dives into a random TODO or FIXME in the SerenityOS codebase, and that article is still in the works....

So what is “living at HEAD” ? Living at HEAD is the idea that at all times when working on a project there only exists a single version of all of your dependencies, regardless of depth. On top of that, you work towards keeping this single version of each of your dependencies as closest to the most recent version available as possible. Now I will admit that achieving this can require quite a bit of work but if the tools you use are working with you towards this goal rather than against you, the benefits are numerous....

As of today I have moved the handful of articles I had published on https://nektro.mataroa.blog/ off and transferred them back here as well as updated my GitHub profile to point back to this site. Now this isn’t to say I’m going to stop using the site entirely, not by any means. I think its great and when I’m in a better financial position I might even start donating. What changed is that I realized is that I really like using Git for deploying my site and having it on my own domain but I didn’t like the experience of using Git/Vscode to actually write the articles and keep drafts....

Originally published on https://nektro.mataroa.blog/ Well hello friends! So I took my advice from last update and kept essentially a journal too keep track of all my life and code happenings from day to day. And wow when I tell you what this has done for my sense of productivity. I will be fair that for my own sake I didn’t document every time I sat down to watch TikTok or check up on Twitter or HackerNews but having a casual record of the time I spent debugging things, making little progress here and there, going down a YouTube rabbit hole, or spending time away from the keyboard really put into perspective what monthly updates had essentially summed up to “lost time”....