A few months ago, when using my Thinkpad X220 laptop, I noticed that it hangs up for a moment when accessing a certain directory. Since the laptop is quite old (I bought it pre-owned in 2015) and I use it rather sparingly (I have a beefy tower PC that serves as my main machine), I wasn't very much bothered by it. Eventually, I decided to take a look into the issue.

For one of my current clients, we decided to use Rust as our main programming language. There were several reasons behind this decision; apart from the technical merits, there's also the undisputable fact that Rust is still a relatively new language, fancy and hip – and when you're a startup, using any technology that came out in the previous decade is just setting yourself up to fail. I mean, it's logical – how can you innovate without using innovative tech? The fastest way to success is aboard the hype train.

As one of the product's selling point was supposed to be "you own your data", it couldn't be a purely browser-accessible service, but rather something we'd distribute to the users to run on their own devices. We already had some headless instances running internally, and with a trivial amount of work, were able to make redistributable packages for Windows and Linux. But we knew that being desktop-only would be a serious blocker against adoption – if we wanted this to take off, we'd need mobile versions of the app. This meant we had to figure out how to get our stuff running on Android and, later, on iOS. Seeing how I already had some experience with cross-compiling and build automation, I volunteered to delve into the topic.

As you may know, I tend to tinker on video games in my spare time. It's been a long time since I actually released anything worthwhile... but speaking of releases, there's always the question of multi-platform support. When making a browser game, the browser is your platform and you don't really worry about the OS underneath. When using a popular engine, you may test if the various releases work mostly as they should, but you're still mostly relying on the original developers' ability to make it run on all the platforms.

But things are vastly different when your game runs without an engine, or using an engine of your own making. You have to take care yourself of making sure the program runs fine on whichever platforms you want to support. But even before running, there's the matter of building – you have to actually compile the program for the target platform. One way to do this is, of course, having a machine running said platform (possibly in multi-boot), which comes with its own set of annoyances. The other solution is to cross-compile – and that's what I'm gonna shortly describe here.

Some four years ago, back at my first workplace, one of our colleagues hailed the rest of us:

Hey guys, a friend of mine released a commercial CMS, he's already got a few clients and he asked if we'd like to poke around and see if we can break anything.

Being a prominent enthusiast of slacking off at work, I happily stopped whatever I was doing at the moment and asked him to provide me the URL to said CMS so I could take a look.

Some time ago, Slack became a really popular tool for instant messaging within companies and communities. Many people consider it an awesome platform; many people consider it nothing more but a glorified IRC replacement. Technical merits and flaws aside, Slack and the many similar platforms are probably here to stay for some time.

During Hacktoberfest Poznań Meetup (October 2017) I gave a talk about copyright and how it affects FLOSS, along with a short overview of popular licences.

During Hacktoberfest Poznań Meetup (October 2018), I gave a talk about how people can support Free Software, apart from just programming.