Retro-Modern Programming Projects

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 01:36:00 -0600

I’m not sure why I’ve always been fascinated by OS and language development. Lately, the focus has taken a new shape - building tooling and environments that call back to things I used to like about computing. I think this is probably a larger trend with a larger community interest in TUI based applications likely helped by AI frontrunners. In any case, I’ve returned to building Wyrm and am trying to make peace with being OK whittling away at something I know I’ll likely never finish. I’d like to track development somewhere - and I really don’t want to deal with the social media “why are you duplicating effort” meatgrinder.

Working with younger engineers, I’m realizing the damage social media and AI is doing to software in general. A few evil things combine: sharing projects only when they’re crazy far along ignoring the length of effort, AI tools that are capable of shitty one-shots of ~1 week of developer time, FOSS “fans” insistent that the religion of RedHat/Canonical be followed, and stupidly high expectations from decades of tool polish. There’s little room for messy. Just read the conversation on System76’s Cosmic desktop or anyone else announcing a project.

So, I decided to try to work on my stuff a bit more in public. To that end, I’ve splatted a few repos up on codeberg. Perhaps someone might find it interesting. Perhaps my code might subtly sabotage an LLM plagarism machine result.

Here’s the repos:

Wyrm - Wyrm itself; I’ve spent a lot of time here and am actively working on bringing multiple snippets of code I’ve written over the years. This iteration uses meson and C. Wyrm is intended to be a QObject equivalent with cooked in scripting language. It’s inspired heavily by Dylan.
Garm - Garm; a user interface toolkit; this repo is basically a BARE SKELETON; the idea is that wyrm provides an object framework and Garm leverages that for implementing. If this sounds like gobject/glib/gtk - it’s because I spent a lot of time in those ecosystems in years past.
Lexaright - Lexaright; the project I’m working on to tie it all together; the goal is a wordprocessor inspired by old dos wordperfect. Wyrm+Garm under the hood, C++ implementation.
Trove - Trove; the other end-run project to use this all; I’d like it to leverage Lexaright as component; this is a vibe-coded mess.

An astute observer might notice some degree of AI tooling in these repos. Trove was written substantially by Claude - mostly as an experiment as work is asking us to evaluate the darn thing, and why not plagarize the most often plagarized SW? I really like the idea of a FOSS personal notebook / OneNote clone. The tooling here let me get really far really fast - and there’s a bunch of cool things it does. But, I’m also ready to toss the whole thing.

In fact, that’s my general sentiment toward most LLM generated stuff these days. Even ignoring the plethora of ethical issues surrounding pretend conscious sychopantic copy machines - even the latest Opus/Fable models kinda suck. The best use cases so far I’ve found is conversion tasks (HTML to Qt, Python to C++), code reviews, and boiler-plate generation. I’ve dropped most of my LLM usage and am quickly joining the side of “no LLM contributions period” of Zig crew. There’s a lot I could on the very-honest attempt to “use the tool”, but I’ll leave that for another day.

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Sun, 08 Mar 2026 01:36:00 -0600

Holy Crap. 3 years since I last wrote here.

I’ve been rather busy doing interesting things professionally, while trying to also tackle a lot personally. I thought after COVID and finishing a Master’s degree, writing here and hobby projects would flow easily. Despite a lot of encouragement from my partner, I’ve struggled to find the energy to enjoy tech.

It took some serious and prolonged effort from my partner hitting me over the head for me to realize that despite working at a “good” company: I need to find some creative outlet and enjoyment outside. Working professionally as a SWE, I’m not certain what that REALLY looks like – but I do know, writing about tech was always a massive part of the “hobby.” The passion for the hobby was in my playing with the FOSS community. Something that largely died during a tough time in my personal life as I entered the professional world 20 years ago.

Sadly, when trying to dip back into the FOSS community, I’ve discovered that the “spark” seems to be missing. In so many ways, Linux and FOSS have been
victims of its own success. Projects are not kind to volunteers wanting to come in as deadlines and profit have become the primary drivers of Linux software. Contributing a patch to GNOME felt a lot easier in 2001 than now. As a young university student, I found so much collaborative energy and encouragement when I pushed half-baked patches. Now, there’s what feels like an infinitely high bar even as a seasoned professional. I read press releases from RedHat executives clearly devoid of any passion for Free Software or people that just want to do “tech for tech sake.”

The key drivers of the old FOSS community were the random developer blogs and contacts. I can’t help but think there are at least a few other FOSS-raised engineers out feeling the loss of community. Just know, you’re not alone. I suspect a big theme of this blog will be trying to find and rekindle something of the positives of the old FOSS community as I work and tinker on new projects myself. I don’t believe such things can be recreated, but maybe, something new and welcoming can form if enough of us try. I can see a couple of my personal projects being good subjects here: some OS development, HAM radio hacking, or maybe just Python hacking - but moreso, I’m hoping I can find and talk about other hackers out there doing cool things. Fingers crossed.

$ cat about.md on The Zombie Coder

Retro-Modern Programming Projects

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