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texcavator

About

Texcavator digs up the small decisions behind the tools we use: the evening a utility was written, the game that shaped a library, the bug that got kept on purpose.

Every post ends with its sources, and posts flag what is documented and what is only a hypothesis. Spotted a mistake? Open an issue.

Sections

  • FOSSils: Origin stories and family trees of open-source projects: who started them, what they grew out of, and what died along the way.
  • eTTYmology: Where a name, path, word or key binding comes from. Short pieces about why things are called what they are called.
  • Bugs in Amber: Famous bugs, glitches and hacks: the ones kept on purpose for compatibility, the ones people exploited, and the post-mortems of the ones that got caught.

Written by Jan Vanbuel. The site is a static SvelteKit build served from Cloudflare Pages.