Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 23, 2025

• Frans Skarman ☛ I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

  I recently submitted my PhD thesis, and while waiting for the physical copies to get printed I thought I'd write about something you (hopefully) wouldn't notice when reading it. I wrote it in Typst, not LaTeX. In this post I will talk a bit about what went well and what didn't.

  Typst (https://typst.app/) is a modern take on a typesetting language that I think has a real shot at dethroning LaTeX. I would describe the language as a mix of markdown and dynamically typed Rust, which may sound weird but is a really nice fit. Day-to-day document writing being markdown-like is very comfortable (certainly much nicer than littering your writing with \). The scripting language is powerful, well thought out, and makes it very easy to jump between code and typesetting. For example

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • The New Stack ☛ New OLTP: Postgres With Separate Compute and Storage

    Thomas Gauvin, a Cloudflare developer, detailed on his personal blog how Neon uses Postgres to implement “a custom storage system (written in Rust) that intercepts calls to update pages in the block storage and stores these updated pages on a cloud object store instead of the computer’s disk. This decoupling enables independent scaling of compute and storage.”

    The New Stack’s Susan Hall interviewed Nikita Shamgunov, cofounder and CEO of Neon, in early 2024. He said that, though commonly used in git repositories, branching was never a good fit for databases.

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • Jes Olson ☛ j3s.sh

    one of my core values is maintainability. this is true of most everything that i own. from my framework laptop to my bicycle, i like to be able to get my hands dirty when things break down, and i will always prefer tools and platforms that treat users as capable and curious. i make a lot of unconventional sacrifices and people think it's weird - but the truth is that i _hate_ maintaining things. i'm extremely bad at it. but when something of mine breaks, i _need_ to be able to dig in myself, because god knows i'm not responsible enough to go through the painfully long feedback loop of having someone else help me. (i am so averse to this in my personal life that i will simply let my broken things stay broken if i cannot trivially fix them myself)

    hence another core value of mine - reliability. i need the thing to work today, and i need the thing to work in ten years. i spend a lot of time choosing my things, and i refuse to depend on anyone else to ensure that they continue to work. i don't care if your company went under, my car will keep working. i don't care if you end-of-life'd the product, my laptop takes generic components that i can insert myself. you get the point.