A Thousand Stars

Last week Breakscale went public. This week it kept going, and a lot of other things came with it.

BreakscaleCopied!

From about 300 stars to 1,059. 100 forks, 12 open issues, and the star graph is five days of flat nothing followed by a cliff.

The thing I did not expect: eleven people who are not me have now had PRs merged. And they aren't typo fixes. kevin9327 bounded the instance count the engine will act on. yashksaini-coder made a timeout get counted once so the failure rate actually sees it. nawazish2 made the load balancer admit through its pool instead of passing everything through. Shashank-Tripathi-07 preserved the autoscaled instance count across structural hot swaps. bluzername documented how vendor sizes become simulator numbers, ishivamgaur shrank share links, valtterisa and Harshvardhan-18 fixed layout and styling. Strangers are fixing the simulation logic in a thing I built two weekends ago.

Then the CEO of Vercel replied to it.

It's one word. I know it's one word. It still did 26,000 impressions and I still screenshotted it. Their CTO liked it a bit later too, and so did about a hundred other people.

It also turned up on Hacker News, which I found out about by searching for it rather than by anyone telling me.

Breakscale also got into Mintlify's OSS program, so the docs are on a free pro plan that renews yearly. The docs are 23 pages generated from the simulator itself, which means nothing in them can drift away from what the tool actually does.

Also got a Trendshift badge, and the site crossed 15,445 visitors. My analytics claims 85% of them bounced, which is technically true and completely useless: there is one page, so there is nothing to bounce to. The 15% who didn't are people who hit reload. So I know exactly how many people arrived and nothing at all about how many stayed to watch a system fall over, and that second number is the only one I actually care about.

GSoC, closed outCopied!

Officially completed GSoC 2026 with KDE. Both evaluations passed.

The final evaluation feedback from my mentor is the part I'll keep:

"While the goal of this work was not to implement a shiny new feature, it does bring some real improvements to UI and editing workflow, and will allow us to pursue the work on a Speed Ramp with most components ready." Groundwork someone else can build on is a better outcome than a shiny feature, and I'd rather have that line than a flashier one.

And the final stipend landed. $1,650.

The thing I keep telling people who ask about applying: it isn't a coding competition. I got picked because the maintainers already knew my name from bug reports, three months before applications even opened. If you want 2027, start now, with a small PR, not with a proposal.

wallglowCopied!

I have a cheap LED table light that's been sitting in my room for ages, controlled by a phone app. A phone app is always an invitation.

So I stayed up and reverse-engineered its Bluetooth protocol. The entire app is seven unencrypted bytes. wallglow is the Linux side of that: a daemon that watches Noctalia's wallpaper palette and pushes the colour to the strip, so when my desktop recolours, the room recolours 0.12 seconds later.

The protocol work for Home Assistant was already done by UniLED and ha-banlanx. I built the Linux side: the daemon, the colour maths, and the part that stays connected.

Moving off DigitalOceanCopied!

Ten months of a ₹0 bill, then $17.54 and a "pay by Thursday or we suspend you" email. Turns out the GitHub student credit just silently runs out and nobody tells you.

So at 1am I moved xevrion.dev to Vercel. Took an hour, and the droplet is gone. Goodbye nginx, certbot, docker, ghcr. It's just git push now. I wrote up the whole migration as a post.

DigitalOcean then waived the charge as a goodwill gesture, which was genuinely decent of them.

The site also came out of the move faster than it went in: 99 performance, 96 accessibility, 100 best practices, 100 SEO.

Also added a Bad Apple easter egg: open xevrion.dev on a laptop and type badapple. And a /book page with a Cal.com embed, so people can actually put time on my calendar.

The rest of the weekCopied!

Gave the Stripe OA. Also got made eligible for Accenture again after the auto-rejection, gave that OA, and got a SQL question I had not practised at all. I found out I was eligible about five minutes before it started, so I ran there and gave it cold.

Two friends got good news this week, one an internship at Visa and one shortlisted somewhere. Genuinely happy about both.

And there's a career update I'm sitting on. Not saying anything until it's actually signed, because nazar is real. Soon.

RandomCopied!

Hit 1,428 followers on X, up 328 in two days, almost all of it from one screen recording of Breakscale plus a one-word reply.

Also updated my GitHub bio to "Building things people actually use", which felt earned this week for once.

Someone posted their contribution graph saying "don't call me lucky", so I posted mine. 3,523 contributions in the last year. Then call me lucky.

Someone in the journal server responded to all of this with the only appropriate reaction.

Cleaned my room properly and started what I'm calling a winter arc. The room being clean is doing more for my focus than any productivity system I've tried.

Happy Janmashtami, also.

The quiz calendar is relentless right now, DBMS on Monday, and I have a stack of scholarship paperwork I keep not doing. But it's hard to be annoyed about a week like this one.