Some deliberately brief updates so I can actually get all this written down finally: First, December was my last month working at Unikie. Some annoying German bureaucratic quirks unfortunately got in the way and made things difficult for me. My understanding is that they plan to continue working with and contributing to Spectrum. Former Unikie colleagues, I'm looking forward to continuing to work with you. :) Relatedly, I'd like to organise another community call soon, as the last one was really good. I'd have liked to do one in January too, but too many non-work things getting in the way meant I wasn't able to make that happen. But let's keep them going with a call in February. More on this soon. This also means that, for the time being, I'm once again funding my work on Spectrum through community donations. (But as previously promised, all the money I raised while I was working for Unikie will remain set aside.) Please consider supporting my work on Spectrum through https://github.com/sponsors/alyssais or https://liberapay.com/qyliss. Hopefully I'll have more to share soon on other sources of funding. What I've been doing recently: I spent December getting the foundations of virtio-gpu support into upstream rust-vmm[1], and January doing work on Nixpkgs. It would be a big win for development experience if I could get rid of all of Spectrum's modifications in upstream Nixpkgs, so I've been working towards that. I'm taking a bit of a roundabout route because I need to be able to demonstrate why the changes are useful in ways that aren't specific to Spectrum — as a result of this, I've actually been working a bit on improving Nixpkgs' FreeBSD support, since it shares some characteristics with Spectrum that most Linux systems wouldn't. (Non-systemd udev implementation, for example.) [1]: https://github.com/rust-vmm/vm-virtio/commits/c527b45dada0a81d343aca7f06759d... Upcoming challenges I'm thinking about: - Way too much of my time at the moment is spent doing QA — making sure new Nixpkgs updates or kernels aren't going to introduce regressions in Spectrum. We do some unusual things, so can't rely on other people to catch problems before they affect us. I want to get some automated testing against upstreams sorted out, so I can free up more of my time for working on documentation and features, which is what I really want to be doing but am fighting for time for at the moment. Getting to 0 Nixpkgs patches is part of this. - I want to improve the experience for other contributors — I know it's lacking in various ways. I think the quickest win here will be to figure out a way to let people join the Spectrum chat through Matrix without being kicked after 30 days of inactivity (which is what the Libera bridge does). I've been told there are various alternative ways we could have this work. Having reliable real-time chat is pretty critical for collaboration, and it's become especially clear, especially after winter holidays, that we don't quite have that at the moment. Also, I'll be at FOSDEM this weekend. Get in touch on IRC (qyliss on libera) or Matrix (@qyliss:fairydust.space) if you want to say hello.