@JessTheUnstill

I hand-coded and shared a Letter Spirit bitfont for the Clockwork PicoCalc, a boot-to-BASIC cyberdeck running a Raspberry Pi Pico.

Feedback I got was,

"When I look at that, it makes me feel like I must be having a neural event."

"Oh god, I am sorry!"

#picocalc

@JessTheUnstill I have a bunch of small projects, some used a bit more widely than others.

I mainly try to solve a problem I have myself, and if the solution is polished enough, I like to share it with little expectation to attract a large audience.

Every now and then someone does reach out to thank me, or tags me on here, and that's honestly incredibly rewarding.

For anyone interested: https://stefanbohacek.com/projects/

@JessTheUnstill I'm torn, because new users (especially in this space) are hard to support, but I'm a major contributor to this software for Modern Western Square Dance Callers, and we've got... Maybe double digits of users, maybe just single...

https://github.com/mpogue2/SquareDesk/

Edit 2: I also think you're cool if you put any work into stuff you've made for free for people. How to videos and documentation, creative art, hell, fan fiction. You're making the world a better place by being in it and not charging anyone anything for it.

It's one of the things I think about regularly, like this @catvalente essay. People love to make things for one another. Share their work, just create for creating sake. AI and corps will never take that from us entirely. It's just too damn much fun to take the stuff your grey matter comes up with, make a thing, and let other people find it useful and enjoyable. It's just part of being human.

Maintaining your parks and neighborhood
Fixing up a community center
Painting murals
Writing a newsletter
Teaching free yoga
Writing fiction
Volunteering
And yes, coding things

It's all taking your time to make something and share it with people with no expectations of anything in return. Which is pretty damn cool. Brag about it and get some good vibes about your free labor.

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

@JessTheUnstill I hope this covers non-devs as well, who put in money, time and hard work to.maintain and provide mirrors etc for those softwares?

Talking about "self-hosting" and I being one of those non-devs as well. 🫠 🙃

@JessTheUnstill oh, I once wrote a hirachical storage system for linux. Means that one could migrate data off to CD-R. It then overlay mounted dozens of CDs onto the original spot. When you acessed a CD, a prompt would ask you to insert the correct disk.
I am very sure nobody ever used that.
But I once got a call from a google recruiter wanting my coding skills. Luckily, I denied.
https://github.com/Gunstick/hierfs

@JessTheUnstill ich bin irgwendie lernen deutch, noch ich bin certainly nicht ein expert. ich bin nicht sure das das weg wollen arbeiten.

die weg es arbeiten ist durch assoziation. das means du sehr die deutch word followed von englitche word.

wie sein nicht invent menschen bond zu microblogging, wie simply took advantage von die methodiche zu gibt sprachen lernen.

wie wollen zu lernen many mehr sprachen. die main bottleneck ist that many sprachen sein nicht habe spreken auf mastodon

@JessTheUnstill

Thanks for the opportunity.

I could use help with developing and organizing #privacy for #smart #meter values.

https://codeberg.org/Ype/publications

@JessTheUnstill probably my favourite is my #JavaScript web framework, storkCore. It’s not perfect and should be updated for modern JS modules, but it’s lightweight, with a MVC-esque model that allows powerful stuff and does not push a class based OO model on JS, but uses the concept of object-to-object inheritance (from the language #Self).

It was used for years as the backbone of the Holvi website. Nowadays I imagine I’m the only one still using it.

http://chiselapp.com/user/Setok/repository/storkCore/index

@JessTheUnstill I maintain a dbt package called dbt_diving that provides simple interface to dependency graph of the models in dbt projects https://github.com/data-diving/dbt_diving/

@JessTheUnstill Here’s my contribution to the pool of not-very-useful software: WordHash, that renders hashes as readable words. If you’ve ever been faced with the prospect of reading out a hash over a phone, this is for you! https://github.com/Synchro/WordHash

@JessTheUnstill
I'm working on a programming language, going by the name of #Rocket.

It's supposed to be #Pythonic, but compilable.
Concretely, that means you can modify types, modules, etc. at compile time (e.g. inject another method into a class, replace a method with a wrapped one, create a class dynamically, etc.), but not at runtime.

Still in the early stages, though

@JessTheUnstill

I used to submit various bug fix and enhancement patches, but haven't written much open source software.

But I did write one fun thing from scratch, a transparent SMTP proxy in Perl. You could put it in front of an SMTP server and it'd relay the traffic bidirectionally, line-by-line, which makes it easy to add hooks for inserting spam tags, etc.

One day I got an email from a professor in Pakistan, asking if he could use it in a class he was teaching. Of course I said yes!

@JessTheUnstill hah yes, I made a tool for making shell pipelines that process data easier and more powerful. I thought it would be a huge success but I'm pretty sure I'm the only user ever: https://www.kitten-technologies.co.uk/project/magic-pipes/doc/trunk/README.wiki

@JessTheUnstill i documented an unknown video decoding coprocessor in some android TV hardware and wrote both a (short) programming manual and an assembler/disassembler/emulator for people who want to run their own code on it

https://media.ccc.de/v/gpn23-144-project-vicigol-reverse-engineering-a-28-bit-risc-cpu

@JessTheUnstill I spent some time with embedded Rust recently, I wrote a savegame library that's optimized for low-level flash storage, with power-fail safety and wear leveling: https://github.com/kpcyrd/embedded-savegame

I specifically designed it to work with the ch32v003 (2kb ram, 16kb flash) by implementing djb2 for embedded Rust too, instead of using crc32. I also wrote some documentation for programming the microcontroller itself: https://github.com/kpcyrd/ch32v003-demo

@JessTheUnstill Not sure if it really has zero users (as I have no metrics) but I built a small webserver which responds with the appropriate url redirects for files in an s3-compatible object storage to use as a cdn for my Mastodon and Sharkey instances: https://codeberg.org/Phoenix616/s3redirector

@JessTheUnstill @Extelec I would but I'm embarrassed that it's still on github and I probably don't have the energy to change it

@JessTheUnstill

I wrote Caphpe mostly as a joke learning experiment (how to make a memcached clone in raw PHP), but I like to think some people have stumbled upon it by accident and learned some new things about PHP.

I should refresh it some day.

https://github.com/rask/caphpe

#PHP #OpenSource

@JessTheUnstill You never know if someone actually uses it!

I wrote https://github.com/omv-libs/swift-identity a few years ago as an offshoot of something I wanted to do at the work I had at the time, then some time last year found that someone was using it at work and gave me a heads up that it ran into some issues with latest tooling.

Got nerd sniped into 1: reworking it for the modern world and 2: Bringing it to my current job (it's been really helpful to clean up some of our old messes…).

@JessTheUnstill

That's me! TBF some of my repos have a handful of users. And I'll claim that the number of users does not necessarily reflect on the value of the effort.

Example: I put together some scripts that could provoke a bug in very specific ZFS operations. The effects from the bug seemed harmless (at least to me) and they defied resolution for years. There was some effort to fix them that were not successful.

1/

@JessTheUnstill If I felt comfy bragging about my projects here they probably wouldn't have zero users

@JessTheUnstill

Many years ago I wrote a shareware tool that would analise a popular dialup terminal log file...

... I got three cheques from it, and 2 emails but each one always made my week.

@JessTheUnstill hey if you would have made it for yourself anyway and it helps even one other person, that’s a 200% result over just keeping it to yourself, therefore totally awesome.And if it doesn’t then you still got to use it yourself, no loss

@JessTheUnstill I have so many such projects 😭

@JessTheUnstill I don't really care about recognition. Most of my software is either enjoyable research worknor stuff motivated by egoistic altruism. If other use it, that's just a bonus.

@JessTheUnstill In college, I was working as a research assistant, writing code for this group of scientists. At one point, I needed a different list data structure for some reason. (I think I wanted both constant-time indexing and persistent iterators.) So I built it in my free time and stuck it on the internet and then pulled it in when I got to work.

I have no idea where that code is now. That was before I started using GitHub heavily. BitBucket, maybe? I don't know. As far as I know, no one else has ever used it.

@JessTheUnstill
It doesn't have zero users because I use it quite often, and other people I think use it from time to time.

Also, I get that the potential user base is small. Using a ZX Spectrum or an Amstrad CPC in 2026 is not that frequent, and there are other (probably better) emulators.

But I like it.

https://codeberg.org/MartianGirl/SpecIde

@JessTheUnstill # there are worse things i could dooooo