Software

Copyright is a concept that most software developers interact with on a daily basis, whether they are conscious of it or not. Every repository, every library, every framework… they all come with a licence that dictates what you can and cannot do with them. This is so baked into modern software development that few stop to question the underlying premise: should code be copyrightable at all? For a primer on what copyright is and how software licensing works in practice, see my earlier article: Licensing for Beginners. The short version is this: the moment you create a work, all rights are automatically reserved to you under the Berne Convention. You then use a licence to grant others permission to use, modify, or distribute that work. But this entire framework rests on an assumption that deserves scrutiny, meaning the assumption that code is a creative work deserving of copyright protection in the first place. ...

If you have ever set up a web server from scratch, you know the ritual. You install nginx or Apache, you write a configuration file that looks like a legal contract written by someone who hates you, you generate a TLS certificate using Certbot, you set up a cron job to renew it, you hope the renewal works, and then you discover that your configuration has a subtle syntax error that requires you to understand five layers of mechanics in order to fix. This is no exaggeration. ...

If you have read anything I’ve written about artificial intelligence, you already know I don’t belong to either of the warring cults that dominate the conversation. I’m not a pro-AI cultist who believes a prompt box will think for him, code his dating app, and balance his chequebook while he vibe-codes his way to a yacht. I’m also not an anti-AI cultist who treats a statistical pattern-matcher as a soul-sucking digital monster birthed from theft. Both positions substitute hysteria for reasoned debate, and they both make it impossible to talk honestly about what these tools actually are. ...

If you spend enough time building software from the ground up, you inevitably develop a profound intolerance for ambiguity. Game development, in particular, is a ruthlessly unforgiving discipline. It is an intricate web of state machines, overlapping physics, and intersecting logic loops. If you do not construct a rigid, explicitly defined foundation for your game’s data, that web will very quickly decay into an unmaintainable tangle of digital duct tape. ...

In this article, I will dissect what are unmistakably the three most widely used game engines in PC gaming today: Unreal Engine 5 Unity 6 Godot 4.6 Before we get to the actual technical teardown, however, I need to establish some context. If you are expecting a standard, Windows-centric review from a studio developer who only cares about which engine has the easiest asset store to flip from, you are reading the wrong article. My baseline assumptions about what makes a piece of software good are fundamentally different from the industry standard, and it is important to understand why before I seemingly out of nowhere start panning multi-billion-dollar corporations for their software design. ...

Fedora is an awesome Linux distribution, but what makes it even more awesome is the fact that you can run AI on it fairly easily. That is, if you know how to run it first, which is the hard part. This article goes through some technical details of getting certain Fedora-specific problems out of the way. Since most Linux guides regarding AI cater to Debian-based or Arch-based systems, I have found very little information on how to get some AI tools running on Fedora. ...

Dynamic websites are websites that generate content on-the-fly, tailored to each user’s request. Unlike static websites, which serve the same page every time someone visits, dynamic sites pull data from a database or other sources to create unique pages for each visitor. For example, when you visit a blog powered by WordPress, the site dynamically pulls the latest posts, comments, and user information from its database to display a personalised experience. This ability to change content in real-time is why dynamic websites are used for e-commerce sites, social media platforms, and other websites where user interaction and fresh content are essential. ...

The most fundamental, yet seriously overlooked aspect of any software is licensing. Whether we like it or not, the fact is that anything we create or want to use is subject to copyright. Worst of all, legal illiteracy is a major issue in the free software sphere. The amount of developers who do not understand licensing is staggering, and it has serious consequences; a lot of corporate exploitation. Developers after developers keep getting tricked. ...