Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 22, 2025

• Ryan Gibb ☛ Emacs

  I realised that configuring Emacs to my liking would be like second job, which I didn’t have the bandwidth for, so I started using the ‘distribution’ Doom Emacs. It enables Vim bindings everywhere with Evil Mode which, coming from Vim, made it much easier to get up to speed.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Mozilla

    • Servo (Linux Foundation) ☛ The Servo Blog: Servo Sponsorship Tiers

      The Servo project is happy to announce the following new sponsorship tiers to encourage more donations to the project: [...]

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • The New Stack ☛ Thoughts on the GigaOm Radar for Vector Databases v3

    These platforms go beyond vector search by combining retrieval with integrated ranking pipelines, multimodal search, model inference and distributed execution. In scenarios where accuracy, latency and scale are mission-critical, this class of system is essential. Vespa is one example of this type of platform.

  • Taylor Troesh ☛ How/Why to Sweep Async Tasks Under a Postgres Table

    I like slim and stupid servers, where each endpoint wraps a very dumb DB query.

    Dumb queries are fast. Fast queries make websites smooth and snappy. Keep those click/render loops sacred.

    Sweep complexity under a task table: [...]

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

  • Kev Quirk ☛ Adding Comments to My Jekyll Site

    I've been working on adding support for comments over the last few months. On a static site, that's hard, but it's finally done.

• Education

  • Matt Cool ☛ Hands Free Chinese Flashcard Maker

    Twenty years ago, I was learning Chinese in a small village in central China, and every day I’d walk past signs, menus, and newspapers filled with characters I wanted to learn.

    But there was no easy way for me to capture them and turn them into study materials.

    So I’ve been building the tool I wish I had back then!