cactus

part succulent, part machine, part angel; entirely programmer, entirely pansexual, entirely agender.

i’ve been programming for over two decades, and in that time i’ve worked on a wide variety of projects.

if you know your Gender 101, i’m Melody Horn (she/her). if you know your Gender 201, i’m Melody Horn (ze/hir). if you know your Gender 301, i’m cactus (it/its).

i exist in a lot of places:

• twitter, alas
• github
• ko-fi
• youtube
• twitch.tv
• mastodon
• bluesky
• linkedin
• email: melody@<this domain>

currently, by day i’m a software engineer at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's Technology Innovation Department. by night i am the proprietrix of Somnolent Succulent Studio LLC and i occasionally make art, but most of the time i just play final fantasy xiv. occasionally i’ll work on side projects or write blog posts (containing opinions that are my own and not those of my employer), like these:

• I Was Previously Job Hunting (04 Oct 2025)

• A 2025 Survey of Rust GUI Libraries (13 Apr 2025)

• Status Update (07 Oct 2024)

• Eggbug Forever: a custom minion mod for FFXIV (20 Sep 2024)

• Abdication Is Not Simplicity, or cat -v Considered Harmless (08 Sep 2024)

• the browser is a terrible place for art (31 Dec 2023)

• No Man’s Sky …unless? (27 Dec 2023)

• i got ⋖Builder of the Realm⋗ on the cloud DC (26 Nov 2023)

• 25-Hour Time (and the Secret Third Half of the Day) (17 Aug 2023)

• the Derivative Gardens Misattribution-OnlyCommercial-ShareUnlike 6.9 Unportable License (15 Jun 2023)

• two heresies about link rot (23 May 2023)

• UUID versions through the ages (12 Feb 2023)

• some axes for a taxonomy of open source (30 Oct 2022)

• writing balanced elevenary in the ogham script (21 Sep 2022)

• A 2021 Survey of Rust GUI Libraries (24 Oct 2021)

• An Anti-License Manifesto (29 Sep 2021)

• How to Develop a Deeply Unhealthy Relationship with Twitter (25 May 2021)

• Non-FSF Copyleft Usage (24 Mar 2021)

• Cactus's Obvious, Intuitive Naming Scheme (21 Mar 2021)

• Can We Please Move Past Git? (22 Feb 2021)

• Every President Sucked (15 Feb 2021)

• Not "Any Purpose" (11 Feb 2021)

• Crowbar: Turns out, language development is hard (19 Oct 2020)

• Crowbar: Simplifying C's type names (13 Oct 2020)

• Crowbar: Defining a good C replacement (28 Sep 2020)

• A Survey of Rust Embeddable Scripting Languages (16 Sep 2020)

• A Survey of Rust GUI Libraries (21 Aug 2020)

• Post-Open Source (13 Aug 2020)

• Monads, Explained Without Bullshit (18 Jul 2020)

• What, Then, Shall We Do? (15 Jul 2020)

• Setting Up A Police Scanner With An RTL-SDR (26 Jun 2020)

• Lifehack: Running An Entire Desktop Session Remotely With MobaXterm (20 Mar 2020)

• Rust 2020: Write Once, Run Anywhere (03 Nov 2019)

• Email Notifications for SSH Logins From Scratch (09 Mar 2019)

• Announcing vidslice (27 Feb 2019)

• Futures (31 Aug 2018)

• Some Thoughts About Work (17 Jul 2018)

• Slicing and Dicing Images with GIMP and Python (23 Jun 2018)

• Windows, Vim, and Python: An Unholy Trinity of Pain (17 Jun 2018)

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