miniblog.

Oct 6, 2014 at 21:48

#emacs on Freenode is full of friendly, helpful people. I've occasionally seen users get help from the maintainer of the mode they're using!

Apr 26, 2026 at 13:16

One big challenge of open source is that the number of users (and bug reports) is entirely independent of the number of maintainers. Both users and maintainer capacity can fluctuate wildly.

Jan 22, 2026 at 20:11

The vast majority of libraries have a single maintainer. Even if you weight by downloads, roughly half of downloaded libraries have a single maintainer too.

Open Source is one person

The Register recently published a story titled Putin on the code: DoD reportedly relies on utility written by Russian dev. They should be ashamed of this story. This poor open source developer is getting beat up now to score some internet points. It’s very upsetting. But anyway, let’s look at some receipts. If you’re not real smrt, it seems like pointing out an open source project is written by one person in a country you don’t like is a bad thing. It could be. But it also could be the software running THE WHOLE F*CKING PLANET is written by one person. In a country. But we have no idea which country. It’s not the same person mind you, but it’s one person.

Jan 16, 2026 at 10:03

Wonderful post from the lead LLVM maintainer reflecting on how the project is run, the design issues in LLVM today, and opportunities to make it better:

LLVM: The bad parts

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