Spritely is going to Guix Days and FOSDEM

Later this month, the entire development team at Spritely will be heading to Brussels to attend Guix Days and FOSDEM! We are all excited to take part in these conferences. They are a great opportunity for networking and sharing ideas, and I fully expect it will be a lovely time as well.

Guix Days is happening the two days prior to FOSDEM, Thursday January 30th; and Friday the 31st. Spritely team members will be there to talk about our Guile libraries and learn from the community. One of our ongoing projects is to port the Guix Shepherd using Goblins and we would love to discuss and receive feedback on our progress. We want to use this un-conference to strengthen our relationships with Guix and Guile developers and talk about how this community can grow into the future. If you are interested in using Hoot or Goblins in your project, get in contact with us or bring it up at the conference!

The FOSDEM conference will occur over the weekend, February 1st and 2nd. For those nearby or able to travel, I'm especially excited about some of the tables being set up, such as multiple groups working to bring Linux to cell phones, and representatives from CERN talking about the open source software they use.

Spritely submitted a number of proposals for topics we want to discuss at FOSDEM that we think are important and relevant to our work and mission. The organizers of FOSDEM seem to agree, as we were given two full hours of time in total to share our vision!! So please tune in, however you are able, and let us propose that a better social web is not only possible, but is already here.

Org mode Witchcraft at Spritely

Start off the conference right by attending my very own talk about how our organization uses Org mode in various contexts! This talk will cover a lot of ground, but the most important thing I want to get across is the freedom that Org mode gives us to express ourselves and convey our ideas.

Today's fediverse: a good start, but there's more to do

Later on Saturday Christine will give a lightning talk on how the fediverse has evolved in the seven years since ActivityPub's introduction. Christine will discuss the advances she thinks are most noteworthy, how she thinks fediverse applications can make use of content-adressing, and ways in which the spec falls short of providing a method for secure collaboration.

Object-Capability Security with Spritely Goblins for Secure Collaboration

"Secure collaboration" is a phrase you'll probably hear a lot from the Spritely team. In this lightning talk, Juliana will discuss the ways object-capability security -- exemplified by Goblins -- empowers people to more easily build healthier, more secure collaborative systems based on consent.

Minimalist web application deployment with Scheme

Dave's talk will focus on an alternate web development toolchain being developed in part by Spritely. This approach is a minimalistic and developer-friendly take on what web development could be. In particular, this approach emphasizes reproducibility and simple bootstrapping which will be beneficial for self hosting and packaging for Linux distros. Our CTO will give a progress update on Hoot, our scheme-to-webassembly compiler, and also make the case that WebAssembly is the path toward more simplicity.

Shepherd with Spritely Goblins for Secure System Layer Collaboration

Juliana is busy working on porting the GNU Shepherd using the ideas of actors and object-capability security promoted by Spritely. This Goblins-based port will allow system administration over the network as well as more granular authorization control for services and daemons. Juliana will give a progress update and talk about the benefits of capability security.

Goblins: The framework for your next project!

That's right, it's back-to-back Goblins talks. I promise you won't want to miss this one though because Jessica is very passionate about Goblins. She will make the case that it should be used for just about any new project you can think of. The benefits of writing a Guile-Goblins application range from easy networking to object-capability security and time-travel debugging. Jessica will go over these features in detail and describe what is on the horizon for Goblins.

Spritely and a secure, collaborative, distributed future

Immediately after the Goblins talks by Juliana and Jessica will be our Executive Director, Christine. She will talk more broadly about what Spritely's mission is and why we are so excited about it. She will also discuss how the close relationship formed between Spritely and Guile Scheme. As we work on building the next platform for peer-to-peer technology in Guile Scheme, we will continue to give back to the community through patches and public outreach.

Talks of Interest

While we love talking about Spritely here at Spritely, some other great speakers are also lined up that we're excited to see. In fact, there are too many to list here, but here are a few that you'll likely see us attending.

The Whippet Embeddable Garbage Collection Library

Andy Wingo is a friend of Spritely and is also the lead engineer for the Hoot project! This talk will cover another of Andy's compiler-related projects: a zero-dependency garbage collector named Whippet. Spritely is very interested in how the transition to Whippet as Guile's default GC will affect the performance of our software. I'm excited to see how his GC compares to earlier models of garbage collection and also how Whippet can be integrated into various runtimes besides just Guile.

The Shepherd: Minimalism in PID 1

Ludovic Courtès is an inspiration to all of us at Spritely. He founded Guix more than a decade ago, and a large part of the Guix system is driven by the Shepherd. This talk will go into the complexity of daemons and services, and talk about why Guix choose the Shepherd as their init system. Even if you're not a Guix user, I think this will be interesting for anybody that has to deal with daemonized software.

A special note here that Juliana's talk about porting the Shepherd using Spritely Goblins will be immediately after this talk in the same room. So kick your feet up and stay a while!

Fediverse talks

Lastly, the Social Web track at FOSDEM 2025 is full of ActivityPub spec discussions that we think will be interesting. Spritely was born out of the work on the ActivityPub spec, and it's extremely rewarding and exciting to see how far people can take the concept of federation.

FOSDEM 2025 is going to be a lot of fun; we hope to see you there! Even if you can't make it in person, though, there are a lot of ways to take part.