Same as last year, this is a summary of what I’ve been up to throughout the year.

See also the recap/retrospection published by my friends (antiz, jvoisin, orhun).

  • Uploaded 467 packages to Arch Linux
    • Most of them being reproducible, meaning I provably didn’t abuse my position of compiling the binaries
    • 35 of them are signal-desktop
    • 29 of them are metasploit
  • Made 53 uploads to Debian
    • All of them being related to my work in the debian-rust team, that I’ve been a part of since 2018
    • Also applied for Debian Developer status (with 4 Debian Developers advocating for me)
  • Made 14 commits in Alpine Linux’ aports
    • 13 of them being package releases
  • Made 2 commits in NixOS’ nixpkgs
    • Also joined their Github org
  • Made 4 commits in homebrew-core
  • Lost Onion, my cat of 13 years, to inoperable cancer. He has been with me throughout my entire open source journey (sometimes being credited as co-author) and who looked after me for my entire adult life. You won’t be forgotten. 🐈‍⬛
  • Developed 6 hand-held games with embedded Rust, most of them being birthday gifts for people close to me
    • game-taco-burglar
      • A motorcycling lockpicker
    • game-antifa-syndikitty
      • A nurse with a secret double life
      • At that point the longest and most in-depth game I built throughout my life
    • game-chop-chop
      • A French tetris-spinoff, this was one of my Fusion projects this year
      • The hardware was specifically designed to be easy to solder/make from readily available parts (~€5 per unit)
      • I gave away a few devices I made, some people successfully built one on their own
    • game-ratatat
      • A space-invader like game about a very enthusiastic seamster
    • game-octo-space-irs
      • As an employee of the intergalactic revenue service, you tax the rich through reversing and cracking computer programs
      • I gifted another copy to a Tor directory authority operator I’m friends with, who was very excited about the concept and levels I designed
    • game-the-curse-of-the-headless-goose
      • A turn-based game about an underground kickboxing club
      • This one was meant to be a rogue-lite (which I needed the savegame library for), but only managed to build the introduction/tutorial unfortunately
  • Picked up work on apt-swarm again
    • Replaced the old database code with a custom engine, reducing RAM usage from multiple gigabytes down to ~9MB
    • Ran a small p2p network all over the world, with ~10-15 locations/countries on average
    • As part of this, found a bug in tokio that could lead to silent data loss in some cases
  • Had 2 of my projects explicitly mentioned in the Debian release notes in their “What’s new in Debian 13” summary
  • Was mentioned in multiple academic papers on arxiv.org:
  • Was referenced twice on LWN:
  • Published a draft version of PlatypOS, an “Experimental toy unix-like userspace operating system with strong preference towards Rust”. As part of this:
    • Developed custom pacman-database tooling in Rust instead of bash
    • During this project I found and reported issues in uutils’ install (uutils/coreutils#8033) and mv (uutils/coreutils#8044) (both fixed shortly after)
    • The project stalled because it’s too big to side-quest
  • Had the first ever CVE issued for software I wrote: CVE-2025-52926
  • Published 9 repositories related to my embedded Rust work
    • embedded-mono-img for all the graphics in my games
    • rp2040-psp-joystick to demo use of an analog joystick input
    • rp2040-demo-st7789 to demo a higher resolution screen I experimented with
    • rp2040-demo-w25qxx to demo how to store data in NOR flash
    • rp2040-demo-at24cxx to demo how to store data in an EEPROM
    • embedded-graphics-colorcast a library I developed so I can keep using embedded-mono-img on ST7789/ILI9486 screens - I used tinybmp in one project but it was fairly slow
    • ch32v003-demo to demo and document the lowend ch32v003 RISC-V microcontroller, with devboards that are commonly sold for €0.50-0.70 on AliExpress (it’s cute but lacks the required 5.1kΩ resistors on the USB-C configuration pins that tell the host to provide 5V, so it won’t work with many USB-C chargers, which is quite annoying)
    • embedded-savegame an atomic/transactional savegame library, with powerfail-safety and wear-leveling, optimized for flash and EEPROM storage
    • djb2 a very lightweight non-cryptographic checksum algorithm that replaced my use of CRC32 in the embedded-savegame library, to make it more suitable for the ch32v003
  • Contributed to the Reproducible Builds mailing list 30 times
  • Developed repro-threshold, an integration for apt to act as a rebuilderd client, enforcing a reproducible builds trust policy of your choice
    • The feature was suggested/requested by a CCC member during MiniDebConf Hamburg 2025
  • Collaborated with an openSUSE engineer I’ve known for several years to debug and fix an issue in gtk-rs that caused indeterministic build output for many desktop programs
  • Volunteered at a soldering workshop for beginners for the 4th year in a row
  • Completed the first year of volunteering in an awareness team
  • Wrote 1 blog post (besides this one)
  • Attended FOSDEM, MiniDebConf, Fusion, the Reproducible Builds summit, the Arch Summit and 39c3
    • Hosted sessions at both FOSDEM (1st time) and Fusion (2nd time)
  • Grew and harvested 2 plants
  • Traveled to
  • Made and printed
    • 2 new sticker designs
    • 2 new hoodie designs
  • Changed my medication plan
  • Got 4 new tattoos

Thanks to everybody who has been part of my human experience, past or present. Especially those who’ve been closest.