Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 19, 2026

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Access/Content

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Wikipedia is now 25 years old — world’s 7th most popular website now has over 7 million English articles and 7 billion monthly visitors

      Wikipedia is 25. Founded in 2001, this community contributor-driven site has convincingly usurped what were once the default general reference works of choice, like Encyclopædia Britannica and Microsoft Encarta. Since its launch, this free resource has risen to become the world’s 7th most popular website, with over 7 million English articles, and around 7 billion monthly visitors. Wikipedia is the most successful non‑commercial, non‑social, non‑search web destination.

• Programming/Development

  • Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Workspaces and Monorepos in Package Managers

    The basic problem: you have two packages in your repo, and one depends on the other. Without workspaces, you’d have to publish the dependency every time you change it, or manually symlink it and deal with links that persist invisibly across your system, break in subtle ways, and behave differently than published packages.

    Workspaces let the package manager wire up local dependencies automatically during install. You edit one package, the other sees the changes immediately. When you publish, normal version resolution takes over.

  • Java/Golang

    • Nicolas Fränkel ☛ Checked exceptions and lambdas

      Java’s checked exceptions were a massive improvement over C’s error-handling mechanism. As time passed and experience accumulated, we collectively concluded that we weren’t there yet. However, Java’s focus on stability has kept checked exceptions in its existing API.

      Java 8 brought lambdas after the "checked exceptions are great" trend. None of the functional interface methods accepts a checked exception. In this post, I will demonstrate three different approaches to making your legacy exception-throwing code compatible with lambdas.

  • >R / R-Script

    • Rlang ☛ Pharmaverse and Containers

      Below I will discuss how the pharmaverse container image has improved our blog’s publishing workflow, bringing our deployment time down to approximately 5 minutes. We are also interested in feedback on potential other uses of this container (like devcontainers) or building additional containers for certain purposes. For those interested, we would be happy to provide a tutorial on containers or get in touch if you have ideas or want to get involved!