(As we say in my town)

Howdy!

I'm Jeff Hykin, a computer science PhD student at Texas A&M writing open source software and living on a grad student budget that gets smaller each year.

While I'm mostly known for syntax highlighters, VS Code extensions, run-anywhere script and meme repos they're actually side-shows to my under-the-hood foundational/bootstrapping work with Python, Nix, Rust, and JavaScript.

The fact is modern software is a giant slow, unreliable, vulnerable jenga tower. The only fix is a complete rewrite -- multiple rewrites from the bottom up. We all know it, but we continue to sharpen our "cutting edge" libraries -- even as the metal corrodes and the handle falls off the blade. Fixing the handle, whether its managers, advisors, or even engineers, usually gets a response of "didn't someone already make a library that does ___?", because the difference between a reliable and unreliable tool isn't appreciated until one of them breaks (the Crowdstrike incident was long overdue).

The work isn't fun, glamourous, or cutting edge, but it needs to be done.

I'll do it so you don't have to.