Tech may have its problems, but at the end of the year let’s give a shout out to any technology which made us happy this year. It does not have to be new.
Tech may have its problems, but at the end of the year let’s give a shout out to any technology which made us happy this year. It does not have to be new.
i think 2k23 was the year of groff for me.
i started getting interested in writing mandoc after reading https://text.causal.agency/
and from there i got into groff and all its preprocessors.
i made a tabletop roleplaying game in groff (it’s about vampires and baseball):
https://dozens.itch.io/vumpire
and experimented with drawing in pic and gremlin:
https://git.tilde.town/dozens/groffduck
and have recently started looking at grap for plotting graphs.
i still think markdown + pandoc is all you need for making pdfs 90% of the time. and honestly https://typst.app/ is much more modern and ergonomic. but i have a soft spot for groff for being tiny and vintage and still highly useful. i write groff table macros in my markdown and gemtext now fairly often to make a quick table.
shell is unmatched for just getting things done. of course I have to shout out emacs, it’s just constantly so useful. I’ve been using chicken scheme this year and boy what a vibe. finally, Alpine Linux best Linux, it’s just simple and easy.
I’m going to do a self-plug here, but I developped a “social non-network” that incentives positive interaction. It’s running in CLI in my home-tilde of RTC, and awaiting port opening for the web version.
It made me happy not only because it’s something I made and it feels good finishing it, but because I hade genuinely good interaction with other users with it.
The blog : https://rawtext.club/~ahub/be_kind/
The code : https://sr.ht/~berru/be_kind/
IRC. Everyday I get to chat with awesome people and learn new things.
curl, outside of the actual utility, everything that goes on from the community aspect (videos, writing, …)
MNT on the hardware side, small team trying to build computers for us.
autoconf because I don’t want to spend ages on ancient hardware getting to the point where I can attempt to build the shiny build tool.
big year for curl. i feel like daniel spent a lot of time educating and evangelizing this year.
The usual suspects: Emacs, Arch Linux, Firefox.