Writing software gives you a unique opportunity: not only the satisfaction of creating something with your hands and then using it, but the opportunity for millions of people to make use of it as well.
Some things you may have heard of
I reverse-engineered some of the Napster protocol and wrote one of the first Napster clients for GNOME. A few weeks after beginning that project, I was hired to help design a Napster clone called Scour Exchange. Both of these are long gone now.
I was one of the early contributors to/employees of LiveJournal, so there's a bunch of my code/influence there. (I'm especially pleased that Homestar Runner parodied a journal style I made.) Some of the external software I've written is available on this site.
Back when I had more free time I worked on a lot of free software. Some of the more popular projects of mine you may have heard of:
- GtkSpell — A spell-check-as-you-type extension to GTK used by popular programs such as Gaim and Pan.
- NativeWin — A Windows theme for GTK that used the Windows XP theme DLLs to make widgets look native. This became GTK-Wimp and was eventually integrated into GTK itself.
- LogJam — A feature-filled LiveJournal client.
I've written some moderately popular Greasemonkey userscripts. One made it into a book.
Bindings
I enjoy playing around with different programming languages, so I have different language-specific libraries collected by the language:
Misc Hacks
- c-repl — a C read-eval-print loop (really!).
- charchart — a tool for generating large Unicode charts (useful for printouts).
- ghosd — a library for on-screen display in X with pseudotransparency.
- arabic — a transliteration bookmarklet for typing Arabic on the web.
I have some code scattered around in various version control systems:
Even More
You might be interested to read my LiveJournal about technology.
Evan Martin, martine@danga.com