Developer Builds Custom Linux Distribution From Scratch as Birthday Gift for Sister

·1 views

A developer created a custom Linux distribution called Project Leviathan as a birthday gift for his sister, completing it within roughly a week. The project involved building core components from scratch, including a custom TTY, graphics stack, and window manager, using the Linux 6.8.0 kernel as a base. He wrote the user interface in Rust and integrated the apt package manager using debootstrap after resolving dependency issues. The distribution also featured a 3D Leviathan renderer, a birthday-themed cinematic intro with animated candles, and a custom 2D cat graphic. The developer, a first-time blogger, noted that the project was intentionally chosen to be challenging and is something he plans to continue developing beyond the initial gift.

Read the full story at DEV Community

This is an AI-generated summary. ShortSingh links to the original source for the complete article.

Discussion (0)

How to Build a Cloud Spend Circuit Breaker That Stops AWS Costs in Real Time

Standard AWS budget alerts are reactive, notifying users only after spending limits have already been breached due to 8-hour billing metric delays and slow email delivery. A more effective approach combines AWS Budgets, CloudWatch, SNS, and Lambda into a closed-loop system that can actively throttle or shut down workloads before costs spiral. The setup uses three alert thresholds — 80% and 100% of actual spend, plus a 110% forecasted spend trigger — giving teams an early warning lane rather than a single too-late notification. The forecasted threshold acts as the true circuit breaker, firing while budget runway still exists to take corrective action. The entire infrastructure can be provisioned using Terraform, enabling automated remediation and stakeholder notifications via Slack or PagerDuty.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

One Developer Tested 8 AI Coding Tools for Two Months — Here Are the Results

A working developer with ten years of experience spent August and September testing eight AI coding assistants — GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Codeium, Tabnine, Replit AI, v0, Bolt, and Lovable — on real tasks including building a React dashboard and maintaining a legacy Python service. The self-funded experiment cost around $190 in subscriptions and was designed to evaluate how each tool performed beyond the initial novelty period in a daily workflow. GitHub Copilot emerged as the safest default option, praised for fast, unobtrusive completions and an improved chat feature, though it tends to agree with the user rather than challenge architectural decisions. Cursor was rated the most capable tool, particularly for its agent mode that can make reviewable multi-file edits, though its best features require a paid Pro plan. No-code app builders like Bolt, Lovable, and v0 were not suited to the reviewer's IDE-based workflow but were acknowledged as genuinely useful for non-developers.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Excel Dashboard Built to Analyse Pricing and Reviews for Jumia Products

A data analyst used Microsoft Excel to examine a dataset of products listed on Jumia, a major African e-commerce platform, focusing on how pricing, discounts, and customer reviews affect product performance. The raw dataset included columns for product names, current and old prices, discount percentages, review counts, and ratings, all of which required cleaning before analysis. Data preparation involved removing duplicates, correcting formatting errors, handling price ranges with averages, and fixing negative review values using the ABS formula. New columns were engineered to categorise products by discount level, price quartile, and rating quality, enabling richer trend and correlation analysis. The project concluded with an interactive dashboard designed to help answer practical business questions about discount effectiveness and pricing strategy.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community

ProgrammingDEV Community ·

OpenSparrow v3.6 Launches External API Module with Encrypted Read-Only Keys

Open-source platform OpenSparrow has released version 3.6, introducing an External API module that allows administrators to expose selected database table data to external services. Each API key is tied to a specific table, a fixed set of columns, server-side filters, and a row limit, ensuring external callers cannot influence what data they receive. Keys are stored encrypted with HMAC-based lookup and are displayed only once upon generation, never retrievable from the browser afterward. The single endpoint at public/api/external.php handles Bearer token authentication and enforces per-key and per-IP rate limiting, returning standard HTTP error codes for invalid or disabled keys. All successful requests are logged in a new system table, giving admins visibility into key usage, while the update requires no database migration or configuration changes.

0 comments Read more at DEV Community