I’ve been wanting to learn how to program for a while. In the past couple of years, I tried many times. Different languages and different tutorials. But I always got distracted, either by another project or another language. I think one of the reasons I didn’t have much luck was that I really didn’t have an end goal, something to work towards. Now, I do.

Recently, I stumbled across an interesting little language named the LDPL programming language. It’s inspired by COBOL and has several neat features. However, LDPL is not as popular or well known as other languages.

Drew DeVault is not your usual software developer. He has a wide range of projects under his belt, including a groundbreaking git hosting service, an operating system for calculators, a tiling window manager, and more. He was nice enough to agree to an interview. I hope you find it as interesting as I did. Enjoy!

(Drew originally answered these question back in April, but I wanted to finish rebooting the site before I posted it.)

First, I’d like to welcome you all to the relaunch of my tech blog. This site was created in July 2016 under the name St. Isidore’s Keyboard. (In case you’re wondering, St. Isidore of Seville is the patron saint of computers, computer users, computer programmers, and the Internet.) The site was built with Hugo and hosted on GitLab. I had big plans for it but got very busy and was not able to act on those plans.

Recently, Bloomberg broke the news that Apple is planning to drop Intel and to start manufacturing and using their own chips. According to this report, the end goal of this move is to unify Apple’s mobile and desktop platforms. This is an interesting idea that just might work in this post-PC world.

In this day and age, everyone either has a website or wants one. For those who want a website, there are many tools to choose from. Unfortunately, most of these options are not beginner-friendly. Here comes Publii to the rescue.

A couple of days ago, I was building a blog using Hexo (a static site generator built on Nodejs). I created a couple pages and installed a couple plugins. When I entered the command to build a local copy of the site, I got a nice long error message. It looked like one of the plugins was causing the problem, so I filed an issue on GitHub. It turned out that I was getting the error because my version of Nodejs was old, as in two major releases behind the most recent release.

[Please note: The Panther Alpha failed to reach its original Kickstarter goal. They are planning to resubmit the Kickstart campaign in Q4 2018. - 1805 update]

In the history of computing, there have been a number of major milestones. These milestones helped to direct the future direction of computing for years to come. The Panther MPC is shaping up to be one of those milestones.

Yes, you read that correctly. I used “Microsoft” and “open-source” in the same sentence, and it’s not a joke. Microsoft under new CEO Satya Nadella has embraced a pro-open-source (and even a pro-Linux) stance that would have been impossible under previous leadership. As part of this new initiative, they created the .NET Foundation to support open-source projects. One of these projects is a fork of the successful but discontinued blogging software Windows Live Writer.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to my new blog about computers and technology. I will be your host, John Paul Wohlscheid.