Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 21, 2026

• Seth Michael Larson ☛ “urllib3 in 2025” available on Illia Volochii’s new blog — Seth Larson

  If you are reading my blog to keep up-to-date on the latest in urllib3 I highly recommend following both Illia and Quentin's blogs, as I will likely publish less and less about urllib3 here going forward. The leadership change was a part of my observation of Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day in the spring of last year.

• Events

  • FSF ☛ FSF Events: Free Software Directory meeting on IRC: Friday, January 23, starting at 12:00 EST (17:00 UTC)

    Join the FSF and friends on Friday, January 23 from 12:00 to 15:00 EST (17:00 to 20:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Don Marti ☛ Google “Privacy Sandbox” timeline

    But somehow I still think this mess is worth remembering. Google tried to do a bunch of crimes in the browser at once and then (mostly) had to stop. So, in my humble opinion, that counts as a win. And it’s worth celebrating, and posting some notes and links on. As scams and slop proliferate, we’re going to need more wins like it.

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla ☛ Data@Mozilla: This Week in Data: There’s No Such Thing as a Normal Month

      (“This Week in Data” is a series of blog posts that the Data Team at Mozilla is using to communicate about our work. Posts in this series could be release notes, documentation, hopes, dreams, or whatever: so long as it’s about data.)

      At the risk of reminding you of a Nickleback song, look at this graph: [...]

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Buttondown LLC ☛ Refinement without Specification

    Imagine we have a SQL database with a user table, and users have a non-nullable is_activated boolean column. Having read That Boolean Should Probably Be Something else, you decide to migrate it to a nullable activated_at column. You can change any of the SQL queries that read/update the user table but not any of the code that uses the results of these queries. Can we make this change in a way that preserves all external properties?

  • Haki Benita ☛ Unconventional PostgreSQL Optimizations

    When it comes to database optimization, developers often reach for the same old tools: rewrite the query slightly differently, slap an index on a column, denormalize, analyze, vacuum, cluster, repeat. Conventional techniques are effective, but sometimes being creative can really pay off!

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

  • Jeff Geerling ☛ Migrating 13,000 Comments from Drupal to Hugo

    After 16 years on the LAMP stack, I finished migrating this website from Drupal to Hugo a few weeks ago.

    What's old is new, as this blog was originally built with Thingamablog, a Java-based Static Site Generator (SSG) I ran on my Mac to generate HTML and FTP it up to my first webserver (over 20 years ago!).