Today is my last day at Kong!

Posts like this tend to be cliché, with the usual adjectives and thank-yous. I’ve already thanked many people in person (err, Zoom!) already, so I thought I’d take this opportunity instead to celebrate all we’ve achieved together.

I feel very proud to have had the chance to work on an open-source project of this scale. The stories we’ve heard through the years really bring home the positive impact these lines of code we wrote together have had on literally billions of people.

So I look back at those commit graphs, and they tell the story not only of lines of code, but of all of the teamwork that went into getting them out there.

I look at these graphs and I see the earliest days in 2017 joining our newly-formed Core Team fronted by Thibault Charbonnier, taking over from the two-man-show that was him and Marco Palladino (who’s still ahead of me in the contributions ranking! — though I’m happy we’re both now overtaken by Aapo Talvensaari!). I see Kong going 1.0, then me taking the mantle as the team’s tech lead driving Kong to 2.0 and beyond, doing whatever was needed to try and help the project forward (even PM at times!). I see my 2021 sabbatical and I see Guanlan Dai bringing me back to take on a new project.

I look at these graphs and I see myself once again working alongside Thibault, this time in the WasmX team, helping him and Caio Casimiro make WebAssembly support in Kong a reality. Finally, I see the time I’ve put in design (which does not show in the commit graphs!) and implementation (which does!) for my final project at the company, DataKit, which is just coming out now. In short, I look at these graphs and I see Kong’s past, present and future!

Commits and lines of code barely begin to tell the story, though. In one of my very earliest days, my first manager at the company, Geoff Townsend, asked me what was my main motivation driver: the “what”, the “why”, the “how” or the “who”. I’m always amused when I remember his surprised reaction when I immediately said: the “who”. I’m a team player first and foremost, and there’s no way I could properly give shout-outs to everyone, but there’s been great people around me every step of the way, from the very first incarnation of the Core Team led by Geoff (Thibault, Aapo, Enrique García Cota, Thijs Schreijer) to the most recent incarnation of the WasmX team led by Robert Serafini (Thibault, Caio + Michael Martin, Vinicius Mignot, Brent Yarger). By shouting out my first and last engineering teams, I hope they represent all Kongers past and present who I’ve ever crossed paths with, and through them I thank you all!

Since I ended up doing thank-yous, I guess I’ll have to do the adjectives too! Kong was a fun, challenging and fulfilling adventure, and I leave feeling accomplished. A new challenge awaits me, so in the wise words of Dave Grohl, “done! and on to the next one!” 🤘

song (mp3) - chords (pdf)

A month of nightmares
has come and gone
Those days of silence,
not a single song,
no lullaby to calm the mind
no melody to whistle while we drive

The morning after
that won’t let go
The lengthy aftermath
takes us back and forth
where every story washed away
is brought back to the shore of our front door

where all those things
now changed and ruined
give themselves a chance
to tell their tale only once more

We all need a special hand to hold
We all need a special hand to hold
We all need a helping hand
We all have a helping hand
We all need a special hand to hold

The indecision
went for too long
But who are we to judge?
Did anybody know
exactly how to act and how to best protect
the little peace that we have

But how to make the memories last
With no memento I can grasp
Are you sure that’s how it went
The story seems a little bent

(Chorus)

Will it be yours?

I had to clone the NetworkManager repo and grep my way through the source code to figure out how to do it, but here’s how to change the background color of nmtui from the default pink to a more subdued blue background:

NEWT_COLORS=’window=blue’ nmtui

As usual, add a line like `export NEWT_COLORS=’window=blue’` to your `~/.profile` file to make this setting automatic in future terminal sessions.

Apparently you can set lots of color settings with that variable

Confession time: once I *almost* added a terminal version of Tetris as an Easter egg in htop.

I managed to implement a real crude but working version of it code golfing to make it as short as possible and got it pretty tiny, then added it to the help screen so it would activate by typing h, t, o, p (since h would take you to the help screen and the other keys would be nops in that screen).

Then there’s the question of how to hide an Easter egg in a FOSS codebase… The best I could think of was to make it into a long one-liner starting at column 200 so that most people looking at the code without word-wrapping editors would miss it. But after everything was coded, I decided that trying to “sneak code in”, even in my own codebase, was a bad practice and the good intention of innocent fun wasn’t worth it.

My fascination with Tetris goes way back. I first implemented it when I was in high school, and it getting it done really gave me pause: that was a real program, something that people paid real money for in Nintendo cartridges. It was the first time I thought I could really call myself a programmer for real. At the same time, it was my first contact with the ethics of software. I had never heard of FOSS then, and yet I asked myself: “what if my friends ask for the source code? what should I do?”

Years later, when we did the first CD version for our GoboLinux distro, I took an existing ncurses version of Tetris and hacked it into our installer, adding a progress bar that showed the status of files copying from CD to disk, while the user played the game (distro installers took forever back then!). Everyone loved it–except for the fact that it was supposed to auto-quit when the installation was finished but we changed the list of packages last minute so it got the count wrong.

A lot of people just kept playing for a long time without realizing the installation was done! (But it wasn’t too bad, they could just press Esc or something to quit and finish the install.)

Our early Gobo releases were full of little fun tweaks like that. In one release we included an emulator and legend has it that some hidden folder contains a ROM (not Tetris!), but not even I remember where that is, and that ISO probably isn’t even online anymore. (We really should have preserved our old stuff better!)

The memory of the Tetris installer in Gobo having a last-minute bug was another thing that dispelled me from the idea of the Tetris Easter egg in htop: while having bugs is just normal, I couldn’t bear the thought of htop having some serious bug caused by code added for silly reasons…

htop has its fair share of “unnecessary code”, such as the “big-digit LCD” meter and the themes, which are more artsy than utilitarian and I stand by them. If anything, I think software in general should be more artsy.

But “hidden Tetris in htop causes buffer overflow” would be terrible PR for the project (and my reputation by extension, I guess). That along with the bad taste in the mouth of the idea of hiding code in FOSS left made me drop the Easter egg idea.

I wish I still had that code, though! If only to keep it to myself as an autobiographical side-note.

Come to think of it, after writing all of this I realize I probably _should_ have included that code… as a comment!! Maybe that’s the way to do Easter eggs in FOSS? Add a fun/silly feature but leave it commented out, so that someone tinkering with the code finds it, enables it and has fun with it for a bit. I know that *I* would have enjoyed finding something like that in a codebase.

Oh well, maybe someday I’ll pull this off in some project.

DreamHost finally bugged me to upgrade FlatPress from my super-old version running PHP 7 to the latest one running PHP 8.1. Making a tiny blog post just to test it — hope this works!