Software Contributions 2019

Open-source software has a bit of a sustainability problem so I try to contribute back to the ecosystem where I can. I am very fortunate to be in a position where I have spare time and income that I’m able to funnel into this. At the end of 2017 I did a round-up of the software contributions I’d made that year. I thought it would be good to do another one now that 2019 has come to a close.

My motivation for doing so is twofold: to encourage others to do the same if they are able, and to highlight people and projects doing interesting and important work.

Financial Contributions

Monthly Donations

I make small (typically US$5–10) monthly donations to the following:

• Arch Linux — My operating system of choice.
• FreeBSD — I like OS diversity.
• OpenBSD — Even if you don’t use the OS you probably use OpenSSH.
• Neovim — My text editor of choice.
• Gargron — Creator of the Mastodon decentralised social network.
• Jeremy Soller — Creator of Redox OS, an operating system written in Rust.
• Jorge Aparicio — Building out the embedded Rust ecosystem.
• Dirkjan Ochtman — Rust developer, author of the askama compile time template language.
• QuietMisdreavus — Leader of the docs.rs team.
• Pierre Krieger — Rust developer, author of many crates.
• Raph Levien — Doing lots of interesting things in the Rust ecosystem.
• Kent Overstreet — Building bcachefs, a copy-on-write file system for Linux.
• Geoffroy Couprie — Rust developer, author of the nom parser combinator framework.
• Nora Dot Codes — Rust tutorials and code.
• Bryan Phelps — Building the Onivim Neovim GUI with Reason.
• Blondihacks — Great engineering and electronics blog posts and videos.
• GNOME — I don’t use the GNOME desktop at the moment but they still do a lot of foundational work for open-source desktops (such as GTK, and pushing Wayland) that I want to support.
• Mozilla — Firefox is my browser of choice.
• rust-analyzer — New language server for Rust
• Crystal — Now powering Read Rust. Yes I’m aware that some find it amusing that a Rust site is not written in Rust. I have my reasons.
• Rich Felker — Creator of musl libc, which powers my Void Linux laptop.
• Sean Griffin — Creator of the Diesel ORM for Rust.

One Off Contributions

• CopyQ — Clipboard manager for open-source desktops.
• Movember — This one isn’t software but my brother took his own life in April 2019. I supported some friends taking part in Movember, a cause that aims to improve mens health.

Open Source Contributions

In addition to financial contributions I also made code contributions, both to existing projects and by releasing my own work. Some of the highlights are:

• Curated Read Rust, my site that aggregates interesting posts from the Rust community:
  • Shared 1207 posts.
  • Completely rebuilt the site.
  • Added a Support Rust page highlighting people and projects in the Rust ecosystem accepting financial contributions.
• 45 pull requests to projects on GitHub.
• Published the cc2650 crate to support running Rust on the CC2650 based TI SensorTag.
• Published a Lobsters client crate and TUI.
• Published the profont monospace font crate and ssd1675 ePaper display driver crate for my Rust powered linux.conf.au e-Paper badge.
• Created/maintain 21 Arch User Repository (AUR) packages.

Conclusion

2019 was a good year for contributions. This was partly due to me starting a new job at YesLogic 4 days a week. I dedicate the fifth day of the work week to personal projects and open-source. I was also fortunate to contribute to open-source projects though my work at YesLogic. We released the Allsorts font parsing and shaping engine and several crates relating to font handling and Unicode.

Onward to 2020!