Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 13, 2025

• Groot Koerkamp ☛ Writing typst in emacs · CuriousCoding

  This is a short note on setting up Doom emacs for very fast typst previews.

  typst-ts-mode provides typst-ts-watch-mode via C-c C-w, which runs typst watch in the background, as well as typst-ts-preview via C-c C-p which opens the current pdf file. Using zathura as pdf viewer provides live updates.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • The New Stack ☛ How the Team Behind Valkey Knew It Was Time to Fork

    For those who don’t know the story, a recap: In 2024, Redis, producers of the widely used in-memory key-value NoSQL database, decided to dump its three-clause Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license and replace it with the read-only Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and Server Side Public License (SSPLv1). That went over like a lead balloon with members of its core developer team.

  • Ben Congdon ☛ Zip Files as (Simple) Key-Value Stores | Ben Congdon

    And yet, surely the generic version of this problem – “I just want a small, low-dependency way to index into blobs with string keys” – must have a simple, elegant solution.

    It does: this is just a zip file. lol.

  • Mat Duggan ☛ SQLite for a REST API Database?

    When I wrote the backend for my Firefox time-wasting extension (here), I assumed I was going to be setting up Postgres. My setup is boilerplate and pretty boring, with everything running in Docker Compose for personal projects and then persistence happening in volumes.

    However when I was working with it locally, I obviously used SQLite since that's always the local option that I use. It's very easy to work with, nice to back up and move around and in general is a pleasure to work with. As I was setting up the launch, I realized I really didn't want to set up a database. There's nothing wrong with having a Postgres container running, but I'd like to skip it if its possible.

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

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ What if the Torment Nexus was fundamental to WordPress?

• Education

  • Anton Zhiyanov ☛ Gist of Go: Concurrency is out!

    My book on concurrent programming in Go is finally finished. It walks you through goroutines, channels, select, pipelines, synchronization, race prevention, time handling, signaling, atomicity, testing, and concurrency internals.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ AIs Exploiting Smart Contracts

    I have long maintained that smart contracts are a dumb idea: that a human process is actually a security feature.

    Here’s some interesting research on training AIs to automatically exploit smart contracts: [...]