links.lmorchard.com - #software

libvips

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 18:27:23 +0000

libvips is a demand-driven, horizontally threaded image processing library. Compared to similar libraries, libvips runs quickly and uses little memory. libvips is licensed under the LGPL-2.1-or-later.

Tags: #dev #images #software

stemdeckapp/stemdeck: Stemdeck is an modern stem extraction platform for musicians,producers and hobbyists, designed to isolate vocals, drums, bass, piano and guitar for practice, transcription, remixing, and creative audio workflows through a modern and interactive interface

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:25:55 +0000

Stemdeck is an modern stem extraction platform for musicians,producers and hobbyists, designed to isolate vocals, drums, bass, piano and guitar for practice, transcription, remixing, and creative audio workflows through a modern and interactive interface

Tags: #daw #music #software

Adobe is Cooked

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:40:48 +0000

What do you get when you spend the last decade and a half exploiting the very same people you were supposed to empower?

Tags: #adobe #creative #photoshop #software #subscriptions

Computers can be understood - Made of Bugs

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:04:03 +0000

Computers are complex, but need not be mysteries. Any question we care to ask can, in principle and usually even in practice, be answered. Unknown systems can be approached with curiosity and determination, not fear.

Tags: #code #computers #dev #software #work

What, then, are we paying for? | Quinn Keast

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:53:23 +0000

Paying for software isn’t paying for a solution. It’s paying for someone else to own a problem.

Tags: #ai #codegen #llms #software #tech

Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle – Dmitry Brant

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 04:11:27 +0000

That’s right — this little device is what stood between me and the ability to run an even older piece of software that I recently unearthed during an expedition of software archaeology. For a bit more background, I was recently involved in helping a friend’s accounting firm to move away from using an extremely legacy software package that they had locked themselves into using for the last four decades.

Tags: #copyprotection #hacks #history #retro #software

How I estimate work as a staff software engineer

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 22:26:07 +0000

It is not possible to accurately estimate software work. Software projects spend most of their time grappling with unknown problems, which by definition can’t be estimated in advance. To estimate well, you must therefore basically ignore all the known aspects of the work, and instead try and make educated guesses about how many unknowns there are, and how scary each unknown is.

Tags: #dev #software #staff #tech #work

Software craftsmanship is dead

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 04:07:26 +0000

I feel like it's been forever since I had a conversation about craftsmanship on the job. It's possible I have just found myself in the wrong places time and time again. Or maybe, and this is something I really fear, maybe the people who truly focus on the craft of software engineering are retiring or getting run off.

Tags: #craftsmanship #dev #software #work

Resonant Computing Manifesto

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 20:32:29 +0000

We suggest these five principles as a starting place: Private: In the era of AI, whoever controls the context holds the power. While data often involves multiple stakeholders, people must serve as primary stewards of their own context, determining how it's used. Dedicated: Software should work exclusively for you, ensuring contextual integrity where data use aligns with your expectations. You must be able to trust there are no hidden agendas or conflicting interests. Plural: No single entity should control the digital spaces we inhabit. Healthy ecosystems require distributed power, interoperability, and meaningful choice for participants. Adaptable: Software should be open-ended, able to meet the specific, context-dependent needs of each person who uses it. Prosocial: Technology should enable connection and coordination, helping us become better neighbors, collaborators, and stewards of shared spaces, both online and off.

Tags: #dev #manifestos #resonantsoftware #software #tech

Software can be finished - Ross Wintle

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 23:54:54 +0000

There is a utopia where we write correct, bug-free, fast, secure, statically-built software with zero dependencies that does it’s job and will continue doing it’s job as long as the platform it’s written for endures. This feels like it should be a thing we strive for. It feels like a Good Thing (TM)

Tags: #dev #software

Building the Hundred-Year Web Service with htmx - Alexander Petros - YouTube

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 18:55:51 +0000

In the fast-moving JS ecosystem, keeping your software current can be a huge drain on resources. But what if there was way to write software that had minimal maintenance burden today and didn't inspire dread in the junior developers of tomorrow? Built into the web platform are all the capabilities necessary to create useful, networked services that last for decades—we just have to build in ways that takes advantage of them.

Tags: #dev #future #js #software #webdev

You Want Technology With Warts

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 18:55:13 +0000

Every single wart that annoys us today, used to be a reasonable feature that someone relied on in their production code. Every wart we see today is a testament to the care the maintainers put into backward compatibility. If we choose a technology today, we want one that saves us from future maintenance by keeping our wartful code running – even if we don’t yet know it is wartful. The best indicator of this is whether the technology has warts today.

Tags: #dev #future #software #sqlite #webdev

Deluxe Paint on the Commodore Amiga

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 18:50:42 +0000

VisiCalc on the Apple II. Lotus 1-2-3 on the IBM PC. Aldus PageMaker on the Macintosh. Deluxe Paint on the Amiga. The computer industry loves a “killer app,” that unique piece of software that compels consumers to purchase new computer hardware just for the privilege of running it. I can personally attest to Deluxe Paint as it compelled even my technophobic mother to buy into its potential.

Tags: #amiga #deluxepaint #retro #software

Kiro and the future of AI spec-driven software development - Kiro

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 18:06:19 +0000

Generative and Agentic AI are poised to bring about a new wave of change. For the first time, there are tools developers can use to translate common-sense descriptions of desired program behavior into real, working systems. Many developers are using these tools already. Prompt-by-prompt, step-by step, they describe the system they want to build to AI code generators. This vibe coding approach to development has already been proven to be a powerful tool. But its power is limited because it is missing one important piece: a full vision of the bigger picture of what a program should do, and why it should do that. Enter specification.

Tags: #ai #codegen #llm #software #work

Kevin Webb: "One of the best examples of LLM developer tooling I've heard is from a team that supports software from the 80s-90s...."

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 04:31:42 +0000

One of the best examples of LLM developer tooling I've heard is from a team that supports software from the 80s-90s. Their only source of documentation is *video interviews* with retired employees. So they feed them into transcription software and get summarized searchable notes out the other end.

Tags: #ai #computing #documentation #history #llms #software