Lazarus

Lazarus: Native Cross-Platform Apps Without the Bloat

Plenty of modern desktop apps ship an entire browser engine just to draw a window. Lazarus goes the other way. It is a free, open-source RAD IDE built on the Free Pascal compiler, and it produces real native binaries that are small, fast, and do not drag a runtime along with them.

If you have written Delphi, you will be productive in Lazarus within minutes. The write-once, compile-anywhere promise actually holds up here. The same project builds for Windows, Linux, and macOS, and the LCL maps your forms onto native widgets on each one.

I keep coming back to it for tools that need to be dependable and self-contained: a single executable, no runtime to install, no framework to keep updated. The compiler is fast, the debugger is solid, and the language is more capable than people give it credit for.

Not every project belongs on the web stack. Sometimes the right answer is a tight native binary that just runs, and that is what Lazarus is good at.

KiCad: Professional PCB Design, Fully Open Source

For a long time, serious PCB design meant paying for an expensive commercial license. That is no longer the case. KiCad has reached the point where professional engineers pick it on merit, not because it is free but because it is good. The workflow is what you would hope for:

Local LLMs: Owning Your AI Stack

The most interesting thing happening in AI right now is not a bigger model in some data center. It is how much you can already run on hardware you own. With tools like llama.cpp and Ollama, capable open-weight models run locally and offline, and your data never leaves the

The Birthday Paradox: Why 23 People Is All It Takes

Here is a question that trips up most people. In a room of just 23 people, what is the chance that two of them share a birthday? Most guess something tiny. The actual answer is over 50%. The trick is to turn the question around. Instead of counting matches, count

Yocto: Building Your Own Linux, One Layer at a Time

Put Linux on a custom board and you hit a wall fairly quickly: no off-the-shelf distribution fits. It is too big, ships the wrong libraries, or has no support for your exact SoC. The Yocto Project takes a different route. Instead of trimming down somebody else's distro, you

Read more

KiCad: Professional PCB Design, Fully Open Source

Local LLMs: Owning Your AI Stack

The Birthday Paradox: Why 23 People Is All It Takes

Yocto: Building Your Own Linux, One Layer at a Time