Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about what you’re making the moment before you actually start making it. That’s when you think you know what you want to make. The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanding what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning. Design is not merely about solving problems; it’s about discovering what the right problem to solve is and then solving it. Too often we fail not because we didn’t solve a problem well but because we solved the wrong problem.

When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make. Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make removes the very human element of discovery and learning that’s at the heart of any authentic practice of creation. Where you know everything about the thing you shaped into being from when it was just a lump of clay, you know nothing about the image of the thing you received for your penny from the vending machine.

#AI #VibeCoding #design #development #making #creation #artiface #craft #coding #programming #technology #humanity

What a whirlwind 72 hours in #Brussels for #FOSDEM! Everyone I met has been working so so hard to build technology explicitly trying to break out of a broken system of corporate hegemony. There were so many different fields present here but I primarily focused on the #fediverse track.

...horrifying message without context, thank you

@mirandah @django @jacob another quote from the same source,

“T]he one that annoys me personally is Facebook buys Instagram for a billion dollars, and Instagram has not donated a cent or a line of code to #Django or to #Python which they built that on top of. There is so much money around open source, there is not a company out there that is not directly more profitable because they're using free software and yet very very few people actually are getting paid for their work on open source.’”

Excellent #FOSDEM talk about burnout in open source by @mirandah. She quotes @django co-creator and Board member @jacob,

“I wasn't getting paid to do the work that I felt like I had to do, and I had to do the work that I was getting paid to do because like mortgages and bills and car payments and that sort of stuff, so I had to do like double work one out of a feeling of obligation and one out of a feeling of like, we live in a capitalist society and I need money.’”

@chillicampari
geo:50.8450930,4.3530871?z=20.0&q=50.8450930,4.3530871(Feux%20de%20Bengale)
https://comaps.at/_4IUjQB0YS/Feux_de_Bengale for the impatient

#LibrePCB 2.0.0 is released! Highlights:

• New, modern UI concept with split windows and tabs #MadeWithSlint
• Schematic buses
• Images in schematics & symbols
• Advanced design rules for vias & planes
• Predefined design rules & output jobs
• And many more!

➡️ https://librepcb.org/blog/2026-01-28_release_2.0.0/

@vform I think @mobian should be mentioned, too. 🤓

PJON, Open Single-Wire Bus Protocol, Goes Verilog https://hackaday.com/2025/12/13/pjon-open-single-wire-bus-protocol-goes-verilog/ #pjon-hw #verilog #FPGA #pjdl #PJON

#LibrePCB 2.0 is feature-complete and a first release candidate is available for download! Help us testing the new UI & features and let us know your feedback:
➡️ https://librepcb.org/blog/2026-01-13_release_2.0.0-rc1/

What's that smell?

@Julf @r-meshtastic.at.shendrick.net it can even damage other nodes and it's ineffective.

Every time I cancel a bloated SaaS subscription and replace it with a lightweight, open-source tool or a 50-line script I wrote myself, I feel my soul heal a little bit.

We over-complicate our workflows because we've been sold the idea that professional means expensive. Usually, it just means vendor lock-in.

Bonus points to you if this means moving away from Big Tech,

#SelfHosted #opensource #foss #programming #sysadmin #linux #selfhost #cybersecurity #digitalIndependence #bigtech

Are you into #opensource ? And in the #eu ?
There is a Call for Feedback by the European Commission for a 'European Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy' For strategic approach to #foss in Europe, and a framework for using open source within the European Commission. You can respond until 3 February. It is useful to respond even if your point has already been submitted by someone else. The number and repetition of arguments is used as a weight. https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/16213-European-Open-Digital-Ecosystems_en cc #fosdem

How my students taught me that Github’s monopoly is hurting the Open Source ecosystem even more than I thought.

https://ploum.net/2026-01-05-unteaching_github.html

#github #floss

I can't help but think mmmmMOSFET when I see these... that choco gate surrounded by creamy channel with mousse source and drain contacts... the ganache seal layer... tasty transistors!

I would love a FOSS tool that correlates code with metrics, logs and alerts in one place. Something where you can immediately see which function generated a metric or a log that triggered an alert.
Or use it to explore a codebase.

@algernon axum and htmx if you can accept running the htmx js part.

SD card readers should be able to eject card programmatically only to give a new life to `/usr/bin/eject`

Pondering if it's worth investing some of my time to set up Garage [1] as S3 compatible storage layer for my data or stay with simple local storage. I could "recycle" my old NAS server for this. That would give me 5TB of storage to use in my homelab. Hm. Anyone here with experience? (Why Garage? It's Free Software, AGPL licensed, and the core team is mostly from the EU. Digital sovereignty starts with Open Source ;)

[1] https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr

#SelfHost #SysAdminLife #Garage #S3 @homelab