Yvan Sraka
I hold a master’s degree in mathematics and computer science applied to biology from Sorbonne University in Paris. I discovered C++ programming as a child and have been actively involved in open-source communities ever since. My professional experience includes work in 3D graphics, developer tooling, compilers, and runtime design using Rust and Haskell. I’ve taught systems programming, computer architecture, and DevOps to master’s students, and I’ve also designed algorithm competitions and coding workshops for kids and teens, helping them build small video games. I’m currently based in Belgium, working as a NixOS consultant. In my free time, I enjoy biking, hiking, climbing, and vegan cooking.
Sessions
Software malleability, or in other words, the idea that a user can tweak their software to fit their use with a quantity of code proportionate to the complexity of their custom setup, is really what I believe free users, as tweaking most FOSS actually often requires quite a lot of technical knowledge to be done easily, even by experienced developers... while it's widely assumed that using Emacs is a slippery slope into wanting your whole system inside it, a fantasy dream that can be lived through EXWM on Guix, that's not what this talk will be about!
I got a weird idea (of course inspired by HP Palm/LG webOS and Firefox/KaiOS): what if my window manager was actually a webview kiosk? What if I could draw native apps pixel inside <canvas>? and then the whole interface could be written as you would code a web app (and the shocking reality is that there are more web developers on earth than desktop manager ones)? and that could actually load within a second, and render at 60 fps while consuming only a few megabytes of RAM? I enjoyed experimenting with that a lot because it actually helped me draw ergonomic interfaces for devices like feature phones (I own a Nokia 8110 4G) that had none maintained for PostmarketOS (RIP Bananui), and iterate really quickly with live reloading and all the great developer tooling that web browsers offer us.
How hard is it to break your computer or phone? That is the question we'll try to answer here, and not with a bench press but just by tinkering with the software. Most mainstream OSes advertise themselves as being "immutable", with the claim that it should require a lot of determination for a user to break the stability of their, e.g., Android or macOS devices.
I've been using NixOS personally and commercially for more than a decade now, and it's really often a question that audiences ask: How does it compare to RPM-OSTree? to pinned Alpine Docker images? etc. and with the release of PostmarketOS Duranium earlier this year, I think there is a good opportunity to look at the diversity of strategies employed to make systems more robust and to answer questions like "what are the escape hatches we can use to still break those devices?"