🧩 The Synthesist

Exploring and linking patterns

Hi! My name is Gopi Krishna Menon. I am a Free Software advocate interested in developing Systems software (Primarily OS design and development).

The four essential freedoms

From GNU, A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:

  • The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
  • The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
  • The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
  • The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

My Interests

  • Linux Kernel Development (USB Subsystem, Filesystems, MM, Device Drivers etc).
  • Emulator Design and Development
  • Statistics
  • Stoicism

My Dev Setup

Projects

  • zc8 : A CHIP-8 emulator written in Zig.
  • turbo-csv : turbo-csv is a header-only simple,flexible and fast csv parser written for Boost.xml competency test with full conformance to RFC4180 standard.
  • DP-CDCL-SOLVER : A SAT solver designed and developed as a part of Decision Procedures course at IIITD. It implements some common heuristics and provides an implementation for Conflict-Driven-Clause-Learning algorithm for improving the performance of solver.
  • rofipeek : RofiPeek is a lightweight tool that overlays your keyboard layout on the screen using Rofi. It provides a simple way to display any keyboard layout as a text file, making it easy to visualise your layout.
  • brainfuck-cpp : Implementation of brainfuck interpreter written in C++
  • brainfuck-zig : Implementation of brainfuck interpreter written in zig
  • gitea-taskchecker : A gitea action that checks if all the tasks in the pull request are completed. I use it for my daily-journal to make sure that I complete all the tasks in the PR for the day before merging back to main.
  • nvim-clutch : Nvim clutch is a simple program for switching to normal mode in vim or neovim by using a FootPedal interfaced with Arduino.
  • wayland-dot-files : My old wayland dots for hyprland.
  • niri-waydots : My old wayland dots for niri.
  • Jaggernaut-pde : My old Neovim PDE.

Kernel Contributions

# Clone the kernel source from git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git
# or
# Clone from different mirror : https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/
# Now descend into the cloned directory and run

git log --author="Gopi Krishna Menon" --since=“2025-08-01” --pretty --format=oneline

Book Reviews

Linux Kernel

My Favourite Books

Thoughts and Stuff I find interesting

  • Earning money from software is not wrong. But earning by stripping away user's freedom, and damaging society is wrong. Shame on the companies that do that.
  • Both Free as well as Open Source Software is fun to work with, can be hacked to your will and is actually of high quality. So please consider using Free software based alternatives.
  • Copyleft licenses like GPL, AGPL, GFDL, help preserve user's freedom. Weak/Permissive licenses helps companies take away the user's freedom through derivative works. So we prefer these licenses wherever we can.
  • Proprietary software is inferior and is often Malware.
  • DRM
  • Windows
  • I prefer Codeberg instead of Github (due to MS, ICE Contracts, AI slop, Privacy, Transparency and the list goes on….)
  • Linkedin - Just why? (https://browsergate.eu/)

Contact Info

Drop me an email at contact@cooldev.in

Author: Gopi Krishna Menon

Emacs 30.1 (Org mode 9.7.11)