It's funny, the older I get the less I care about this stuff. I like to use technology to, well, live my life in a more effective, effort-free manner. I have lots of friends who aren't other nerdy techies. In high school I refused to use "proprietary, inefficient WYSIWYG garbage that disrespected the user" like Word and typed up all of my essays in LaTeX instead. Now I get accounting spreadsheets for vacations going on my smartphone using Google Sheets. I still love writing code but my code has become more oriented around features and experiences for myself rather than code for the sake of code.
I love exploring low-latency code but rather than trying to create small, sharp tools the suckless way, I like to create low latency experiences end-to-end. Thinking about rendering latency, GUI concurrency, interrupt handling, etc. Suckless tools prioritize the functionality and the simplicity of code over the actual experience of using the tool. One of my favorite things to do is create offline-first views (which store things in browser Local Storage) of sites like HN that paper over issues with network latency or constrained bandwidth leading to retries.
I find suckless and permacomputing to be the siren song of a type of programmer, the type of programmer who shows up to give a presentation and then has to spend 10 minutes getting their lean Linux distro to render a window onto an external screen at the correct DPI, or even to connect to the wifi using some wpa_supplicant incantations.
I love exploring low-latency code but rather than trying to create small, sharp tools the suckless way, I like to create low latency experiences end-to-end. Thinking about rendering latency, GUI concurrency, interrupt handling, etc. Suckless tools prioritize the functionality and the simplicity of code over the actual experience of using the tool. One of my favorite things to do is create offline-first views (which store things in browser Local Storage) of sites like HN that paper over issues with network latency or constrained bandwidth leading to retries.
I find suckless and permacomputing to be the siren song of a type of programmer, the type of programmer who shows up to give a presentation and then has to spend 10 minutes getting their lean Linux distro to render a window onto an external screen at the correct DPI, or even to connect to the wifi using some wpa_supplicant incantations.