did (and why I stopped them)
Stuff I've stopped doing for good.
#Win-builds
I started using Linux a few years after using Free Software on Windows. It felt important to me that Free Software is available on Windows but devs are mostly on Linux and Windows support is often both an after-thought and a chore. Win-builds was meant to solve this.
While a technical success, this project is probably a marketing failure. I see different reasons to this depending on the demographic.
- Free Software developers: from my contacts with several, the feature/quality threshold to reach increased continually most probably because they were actually not motivated (at all) by Windows stuff.
- Windows users building for Windows: even though win-builds could be used from MSYS and Cygwin, it has a Linux/Unix lineage and that made it uninteresting/repulsive to them.
- End-users: not a failure because they were not an actual target demographic since they were only to be reached after application developers package using Win-builds.
I also set myself a difficult goal with security updates. This proved too much to do without skimping on tests and QA.
With WSL, people could/should use a Linux distribution which has cross-compiled packages (Debian/Ubuntu have it and have developers for the packages, OpenSUSE and Fedora do too). It's slightly less user-friendly for people used to Windows.
A few years after the project end, I let the domain name lapse. It seems the domain name was still interesting enough to be squatted and still be.
#Lablgtk
GTK+ bindings for OCaml. Lablgtk provides a fairly wonderful API which is high-level, safe, and efficient both for programming and running.
I spent a few years contributing to it, improving various aspects (fixing bugs, extending coverage, API and high-level wrapper, attempting to take advantage of gobject-introspection, demystifying it to the community, and building FRP-style workflows).
Unfortunately, following GTK+ is incredibly tough and gobject-introspection was hardly a practical solution due to its large bias in favor of Python (and Javascript).