Coding Updates of 2025
As the new year started is a good time to do a bit of review on what I worked on the last year, I will write mostly on the side-projects/coding hobbies I did in the 2025, so let's first to a list of all I hacked on
So let's go trough all of it
Coding
Desktop
First let's start with my personal desktop use, since 2024 I had a new laptop so I tried to run it with a setup that was not my usual, I discovered Niri a Wayland compositor written in Rust, is a pretty cool project not exactly matching my use case, but implement well its target use cases, so I tried it on my laptop, together with it I used at first Waybar, and this bring to my first small set of open source contributions, and first I contributed the configuration of Cargo deb to Niri, so I could use it easily with Debian, than after fixing this small itch I wanted to improve the bar I was using, Waybar was working OK, but was missing some features I was looking for, and being not enough comfortable to do some deep hack with c++, I looked for something done in Rust, and I found Ironbar with more or less give me similar features on what I was using with Waybar, so I started to hack on it, but before adding features on it, I noticed that on the project was happening a big refactor, it was migrating to GTK4, so I helped the author getting the migration done (see PR 1043 PR 1029 PR 1179 ), done that I implemented some minor features I needed and than tried to implement one major feature that was a list of window of the current workspace, I stumbled on a major problem Wayland did not have a stable protocol to list the windows of a workspace, so to implement it on Ironbar I had to implement it for all the supported compositor, that make it a work to big to be worth done, so finally I gave up.
After while also because of other struggle with wayland not yet well supported by electron apps and by other apps like vim(now should be), I slowly start to struggle with all the missing features, and at some point when I did not have the time and mental bandwidth to handle all the little trouble with Wayland, I decide to switch back to something I used for years, and by that I mean gnome-flashback which after all the years still works pretty well and is low overhead, it also has the usability patterns I'm more than used to.
Tools
Another minor project I maintain is mdbook-variables on this small project I did mostly fixes around missing variable and dependencies updates, I also shipped a couple of patch releases and a minor release with the update to the latest minor of mdbook.
Servers
Another(hopefully small) project I started a few years ago is Vacuna, which is actually powering this blog, this project received some focus this year, with new features like direct acme support and fixes around path definition ecc, with a few patch release and a minor release shipped, after all this work now Vacuna has all the features I actually need, there are many other features I could add, but for now I'm holding back waiting for my own need for it, or the needs of other eventual users (and maybe also the contributions), in any case I want to keep this project on the target of being a server for self hosting static sites, and that can be used also by not too tech savy users.
One fairly big project I also (independently) maintain is OrientDB this take quite a lot of my coding and is open source so I like to mention it, you can read the updates of the work happened on it last year here.
Libs
The other open source project I spend quite some time on is Persy, I kept working on stabilizing it and improving it's integration test like mentioned in the release post more work happened on it to add more introspection to investigate on eventual issues and for writing more advanced crash-tests, on the side of crash tests as well there was improvements and continuous testing to verify regression and fixes.
Using
Related to coding but not really coding, I've started using also Codeberg for hosting projects, you could have guessed this from the forgejo runner blog post, now I'm actively using GitHub, GitLab and Codeberg and I think I will keep using all of them this year as well, also the next source collaboration software I want to try is Radicle which is quite cool but it does have a higher starting treshold, let's see what happen this year.
Self Hosting
Apart of direct coding I do self host a lot of software, at the current moment I do host mostly for personal use, or for experimentation instances of: vaulwarden, conduit, stalwart, vacuna,acme_redirect, Mastodon(at techdon.dev), matomo, together with other more classical software like apache, dovecot, postfix, opendkim. When it is possible, I try contribute back to some of this projects even though I do not recall any big contribution last year.
I do also run some my own closed source service, but is off-topic here :)
Ko-fi