Technology

This site is subdivided into a few hubs for my various projects.

Soft Machine is run by an amateur

Amateur comes from Latin amātor (lover) -- computers have been a life-long passion of mine, though they did not return the love very often. Over the years, I realized that it was hardware, and not programming, that appealed to me most. Regardless, I strive to become a better programmer, and I will share here microprograms that are born out of my successful attempts.

Human-machine interfacing

I am passionate about open-source hardware and software. Technology should not hide its workings from you and should serve as a helpful extension. While unmanned automation can be very useful, the user should still be able to control, study, repair, and modify various parts of the system, whether its a program or a microwave.

I am particularly interested in highly interactive technology, things whose flow of instruction can be manipulated in real-time by the user. While this can be said about utilities like graphical servers and windowing managers, I count hardware as well. Most such hardware is analog, it seems. Analog will always have a special place in my heart over digital because it has soul.

Philosophy

I believe that software and hardware should do just about what they're intended to do and that's it. Programming as a practice and an art was engendered by our need to automate and speed up processes. (Of course, programs are ulimately limited by hardware limitations, as are our minds limited by our bodily needs, but hardware capabilities in the modern age are more than enough.) Software should, broadly speaking, efficiently do what it is written to do in the simplest (safe) way there is, minimizing not only lines of code but instruction cycles. Overall, proprietary software is not friendly to the user in the sense that it works with you.

While hardware nowadays is powerful enough that programs need not be optimized down to the nanosecond, I find value in minimizing how much of my resources a program uses, allowing more room for complex and heavy operations. This was driven by me having to spend time with a slow computer that often froze when its RAM reached 50% of use. I found myself minimizing RAM to the extreme, forgoing GUI most of the time and using the lightest programs I could find. Even though I did this out of necessity, the habit stuck, and I found in simplicity a great beauty. Utilities should be purely functional, without unnecessary fluff. Unless, well, you want it and can afford to use it.

Technological advancement is too rapid for my liking, too. Upon the inception of the Industrial Revolution, technology became our bane and curse, as much as it is our saviour in many fields. The heavy commercialization of practically everything in the world has led to many practices in production and design that I find unsavory and even harmful if you consider the environment. For computers in particular, I see a trend in advancement that grows at an unreasonably fast pace, and software tends to catch up and bloat. This is evident if you consider the minimum required RAM for the average computer user over the years, especially when many basic open source system software projects have not changed as much in their requirements over the course of decades.