Jan's Blog

How can I love Zig if zig doesn’t love me back?

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

draft: a burned out maintainers guide on how to maybe contribute to open source (perhaps)

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been participating in open source for close to a decade and many times lacked information that could have helped me or got information that didn’t prepare me for reality, this is not a real guide just a incoherent string of thought that is based on my personal experience, view everything written with subjectivity.

Step 0: do something else first

No seriously, if you are fresh start off making something independent and just put it out there. This doesn’t just mean software projects either, you can go ahead and write, draw, translate some text you found somewhere, ANYTHING, publishing this somewhere public is even better because it gives you a chance to smell the room.

The state of multi-GPU support in Linux distros

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

and how we ended up here

Automating GitLab labeling

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

simplifying ticket management

My OpenFortress Launcher history

Thu, 10 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Open Source Launcher for the Open Fortress mod

Wii Homebrew Browser revival

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

taking old and making it new again

GameBoy Thumbnails on Linux using sameboy

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Where I started

My introduction to SameBoy came from stacksmashing’s “How to reverse engineer & patch a Game Boy ROM” video.

I’m not big on reverse engineering but I do enjoy a good GameBoy game when I see one.

and there it was

this is the type of integration I like to see from projects

but these kinds of features are almost never present on Linux be it because no one bothers or because each major DE supports a different method.

Application Launcher

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

executable hell

a lot of applications these days are distributed in multiple executable files

especially game mods

launching these programs directly is fine and good but for things like mods for steam games that require a third party executable thats where the problems come in, especially on Linux.

My local install of Modern Warfare 2 with IW4x installed has 3 executables

iw4mp.exe, iw4sp.exe, iw4x.exe

It gets away with this on steam by having 2 different titles for singleplayer and multiplayer