I have never been an open source purist or ideologue. It actually wasn’t until ten years ago or so that I really started to engage with and contribute to open source projects. In that time I’ve migrated from being philosophically ambivalent about free and open source software (FOSS) to being a very large proponent of it. Even within that progression I’ve gone from finding the “viral nature” of copyleft licenses to be unfair to feeling that non-copyleft licenses lead to more practical unfairness in many cases. My driving motivation is the essence of fairness combined with believing that humans sharing information as openly as possible is what is best for us all. I optimize that in my own projects by choosing the copyleft Mozilla Public License (MPL) as my go-to open source license. In this post I detail my thoughts behind that.

When someone comes to me asking how to get started with making bread I usually point them to Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread technique which was made famous in the New York Times, video link here . It is a dirt simple way to get tasty bread which most of the times comes out looking nice. However one potentially daunting part of it is the use of a dutch oven preheated to 500 degrees that one has to put the dough into. I was discussing this with my neighbors as a great thing to do with kids but the dutch oven step had me concerned. I therefore decided to try it with cold metal bowls and cookie sheets instead. As you can see above and below my first try didn’t come out perfect but I think it came out well enough to document it here.

As a software engineer I know that having backups is important in case things are accidentally deleted or destroyed I also know that testing backups is an important thing to do. Simply having it doesn’t count. For my sourdough starter that I’ve been keeping going for over a decade and that the neighbor who gave me some has kept going since the mid-70s the fear of accidentally killing it means that it gets a backup. The backup is in the form of drying it out and storing it like that. I did this several years ago with mixed success. Now that I have a food dehydrator I have a much better backup. It’s so good that some friends want some for themselves to get started with sourdough. I therefore have decided to document the process of reactivating the dried starter. This whole process takes 4-5 days to go from dried flakes to making a fully raised real loaf of bread.

While sourdough discard can be used for many purposes from English Muffins to pancakes to pizzas, sometimes I just want to use it up quickly and easily and no fuss. I do this by using all of the starter to make a sourdough roll. This won’t be the sexiest best roll you’ve ever had but it is tasty and is the equivalent of a “one pot” past recipe but for sourdough bread.

I’m making my way through my podcast backlog (now down to “just” 25 hours) from the oldest to the latest episodes for a change. Buried in the backlog was this Gastropod Podcast episode on the history of potato usage in food history. It is the usual combination of history with some tasty tidbits. One apparently not so tasty tidbit was the use of the potato in what’s called Rumford’s Soup . This split pea, barley, and potato soup was designed as food for the poor and imprisoned in Germany by Sir Benjamin Thompson . Their contributor described it as having “mixed” reviews. It’s intended purpose was to feed these masses but Thompson himself thought it being tasty was important and believed that it was. What’s the real scoop on it? I decided to make a batch myself and look at it’s nutritional viability using my trusty Cronometer.com .

One of my chief gripes about modern development is the disk and memory bloat that so often seems to come with modern tool chains. I like having access to cross platform managed languages like Kotlin and C#. I appreciate but don’t love the language offerings for doing the same things with JavaScript and TypeScript. These languages though are positively bloated compared to old fashioned C and C++. Is that just the price of doing business? I used to think so until recently. A few weeks ago OSNews posted this story on a new OS called Vinix which is trying to write a whole OS in a language called V , in the same way that Redox is trying to do it with Rust. I never heard of the language but became intrigued with an initial look. The more I read about it and begin experiments with it the more I like.

I’m always looking for new ways to use up my sourdough starter “discard”. When I started doing sourdough over a decade ago my go to was always pancakes followed by English Muffins . Recently I’ve mostly been using it for pizza crusts using the King Arthur Sourdough Pizza Crust recipe. I’ve tried various bread recipes but was never that impressed with them until now. This sourdough ciabatta post by user P.J. Smith over at The Fresh Loaf bread making enthusiast site really did the trick. His recipe is heavily inspired by this one posted by Jason Molinari on USENET back in 2006. Mine below is heavily inspired by his.

Earlier this year I was having several discussions about the actual control of development stacks. It started with people pooh poohing the .NET stuff because Microsoft has a lock on most of the contributions. It then started veering towards why people didn’t like Java because of Oracle being the big daddy on that project, and so on. The question to me then was if there was a succinct exploration of that for those projects. I found a few things but nothing that was doing it for me. Then the whole Elastic/Kibana re-licensing event happened which caused the spawn of the Amazon fork. Around that question came up discussions about how much Amazon had or had not contributed compared to how much money they were making off of it at the expense of the vendor who open sourced it. I finally decided to do an analysis of open source contributions myself. After looking around for some tools I found some that did some of the job but not entirely. That began my development of my own tools and integration of some others to create visualizations of open source project contributions so that I could make some assessment of things like stability, diversity, etc. within the confines of what information is available in their Git histories. This post is an exploration of those tools and my process.

Last year when I heard that the Basecamp team was having a crack at transforming email I was very excited. I had been trying to get off of Gmail, which had been my main stay personal and corporate email system for some time. It was part of my efforts to get out of the walled gardens of Google etc, see this post from back in 2018. I initially tried a service called KolabNow but it just didn’t cut it at all. I therefore ended up doubling back to Gmail. I got a trial subscription to Basecamp’s new hey.com email service during the pre-release period. I liked it enough to pay for a full year of it for $99 and figured I’d work through my growing pains and shortcomings. I never did. Recently someone turned me on to another service option Fastmail which I’ve been playing with considerably during this 30 day trial. I’m sufficiently impressed that not only am I going to ditch hey.com but I can probably now properly ditch Gmail as well. Below is a detailed discussion of the pros and cons of each.

I’m trying to dial back in my diet a bit. As part of that I’m reviving my attempt to diversify my nutritarian diet recipes. I have my go to Nutritarian Black Forest Mushroom Soup recipe that I make even when I’m not in a dialed in diet mode along with a few others. I wanted something more. Flipping through the recipe section of Eat to Live my eyes and stomach were drawn to the Easy Three Bean Vegetable Chili (alternate link here ). I’ve used it for some inspiration for my own Impossible Meat based three bean vegetable chili recipe below.