- Hi! I’m Meghan, and I’m a 26yo trans fem software engineer that writes code by day and writes some more by night but people are what really make me happy.
- Here you’ll find some thoughts on things and obscure scripts that I find helpful to me so I thought might be helpful to others.
- The source of this blog, like many of my projects, is open and available here https://github.com/nektro/mlog.
- If you’d like more from me, I can be found in a variety of places around the Web:
- https://github.com/nektro
- https://sr.ht/~nektro/
- https://mastodon.social/@nektro
- https://twitch.tv/nektro77
- hello@nektro.net
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....
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....
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....
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....
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”....
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....
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”...
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....
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....
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....