Welcome to my blog!

Making Zigmod More Friendly to System Package Managers

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....

August 5, 2023

A journey in contributing to LLVM for the first time

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....

August 2, 2023

Automating Living at Head With Zigmod

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....

August 1, 2023

Goodbye Mataroa, kind of

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....

June 22, 2023

Status update, January 2023

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”....

January 15, 2023

Status update, December 2022

Originally published on https://nektro.mataroa.blog/ Hello all! So far when writing these I’d wait till the 14th/15th/16th and then use github endpoints to walk-back all the history I’d made that month. eg ones for issues, pull requests, and commits. However, I feel like this misses out on a lot of research and other ‘soft’ work as many call it. So I think going into the new year I’m going to take notes as I go along, much more similar to a journal and then edit it in the final days....

December 20, 2022

Send and Compose Plain Text Emails in Thunderbird

Originally published on https://nektro.mataroa.blog/ Send Inbox > Write Options > Delivery Format > Plain Text Only Compose From the main menubar, Edit > Account Settings Go to “Composition & Addressing” Un-check “Compose messages in HTML format”...

December 19, 2022

Hello Mataroa

Originally published on https://nektro.mataroa.blog/ This is a very nice site and pretty in line with what Ive been looking for lately. mlog.nektro.net will likely still have its uses but Hugo/git based blog feels like a lot of friction that I feel stops me from writing sometimes. I fell behind on my monthly status updates and I’ve sure been busy. I went to SYCL and met tons of cool folks in Milan and had my birthday this month as well....

November 25, 2022

Status update, August 2022

Hello all! I had quite a few life happenings this month and ran into some unexpected complications with projects so I’m not quite where I thought I was going to be with progress this update, but there’s still a good amount to talk about so I’ll get into it. I marked my 6 and 2 month anniversaries with my partners, I started a new job at Humu on the 8/8 after being laid off from my previous company back in mid April, and I did some logistical organizing to make developing at my apartment vs my partners' apartment more smooth....

August 18, 2022

Status update, July 2022

Hello! It’s been a very warm July in Portland and I can’t wait for it to continue. Last month I started on an article announcing a new project, Magnolia Desktop. If it grows beyond being a personal project I see it as a challenge to the GTK stronghold to bring new life to both developer and user experience. I ended that article saying that next up on my list of things to work on was icons and more, and in the midst of working on the icon demo I ran into a number of seemingly unavoidable miscompilations....

July 19, 2022