Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Manton Reece ☛ ActivityPub paper cuts
Everyone who has implemented ActivityPub from scratch knows that there are implementation-specific quirks that trip up developers, making compatibility between apps more difficult. Some of these issues are being clarified by the Social Web Community Group. Test suites will help too. Micro.blog has had ActivityPub support for years and we’re still finding edge cases.
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University of Toronto ☛ I think (GNU) Emacs bankruptcy is inevitable in the longer term
The elements pushing towards Emacs bankruptcy are relatively straightforward. First, Emacs wants personal customization in practice, so you will build up a .emacs for your current version of Emacs even if you don't use third party packages. Second, Emacs itself changes over time, or if you prefer the standard, built-in packages change over time to do things like handle indentation and mail reading better. This means that your customizations of them will need updating periodically. Third, the Emacs community changes over time in terms of what people support, talk about, recommend, and so on. If you use the community at all for help, guidance, and the like, what it will be able to help you with and what it will suggest will change over time, and thus so will what you want in your Emacs environment to go with it. Finally, both your options for third party packages and the third party packages themselves will change over time, again forcing you to make changes in your Emacs environment to compensate.
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Education
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Phil Eaton ☛ A reawakening of systems programming meetups
This year has seen a resurgence in really high quality systems programming meetups. Munich Database Meetup, Berlin Systems Group, SF Distributed Systems Meetup, NYC Systems, Bengaluru Systems, to name a few.
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