About — GNUcode.me

Hi! I'm Joshua Branson. I'm a tinker with a passion for libre software. GNUcode.me is my journey towards aiding the GNU project. I also occassionally write free software. Wanna be my friend? Send me an email: joshua AT dismail DOT me

My git repositories are available at notabug.org/jbranso. You'll find my emacs' doom's configuration there, my guix config that runs this site, and the souce code for this site. It uses Haunt, which is a static site generator!

I have been uploading some of my hacking videos online. You can view them here. I've got videos about guile, emacs, guix, etc.

My irc nick is jab or gnucode. I usually hang out in the #guix or #hurd irc chatroom in libera.chat.

I am particularly interested in the software below.

GNU Guix is the official GNU Operating system and universal package manager. It supports declarative system configuration, atomic updates, reverting to previous versions of packages and system state! With it you can declare developmental environments with packages from programming languages like javascript, python, ruby, rust, R, guile, etc. GNU Guix lets you declare your entire operating system environment as scheme code. It is super awesome. I use it on my laptop, and it powers this website!

GNU Emacs is the world's best operating system. It also includes a fabulous text editor, email client, task manager, web browser, etc. There are people that open up their computer, and the only program they use is Emacs! You can do literate devops, play games, edit remote files, program in any programming language. It is a fabulous and extremely customize text editor.

GNU Guile is the GNU Ubiquitous Intelligent Language for Extensions, the official extension language of the GNU system. It allows one to extend their application in what is perhaps the best programming language in the world: scheme. It supports most programming paradigms, is reasonably fast, has numerous features that many languages lack, and is famously flexible in the things that it can do.

GNU Guile is an implementation of scheme, with the goal of helping programmers create flexible applications. If bits of your application need to be preferment, then you can write those bits in C. Guile has great support for inter operating with C.

OpenBSD is perhaps the most secure operating systems know to man. They refuse to sign any NDAs or allow proprietary software in their OS (though they do allow proprietary firmware, which is needed for various hardware to function). They design of OpenBSD is pretty slick, and the developers are really prolific software developers. They have developed httpd, opensmtpd, and quite a few bits of software. They support 14 different platforms including riscv64, amd64, arm64, powerpc, and some other ones. That's really quite impressive! They have designed new security features including pledge and unveil. If you want a really powerful safe-by-default OS, then OpenBSD is really worth your time.

The GNU Hurd is the GNU project's official kernel (of course I've saved the best for last). It is currently not as feature-complete as it ought to be, but it has a ton of amazing features like the possibility of extending the kernel with high level languages like scheme or python. It is based on the design of a microkernel. It's kernel is only about 90,000 lines of code, whereas the Linux kernel is approaching 30 million lines of code. The GNU/Hurd wants to support an extensible operating system, where the user is free to securely change virtually any aspect about their system.