u/SuperCoolPencil

Back in January this year, I made a post about Surge, an open-source download manager/library written in Go. When I wrote that post, we had no stars, no releases, no users.

We mostly built it because our college internet sucked, we wanted to solve a problem we had, and we thought maybe it would look good on our resumes lol. I expected it to get like a 50-100 stars which would be awesome.

Since then we have 3400+ stars, 150+ forks, and people have actually started using it, contributing to it, reporting bugs, suggesting features, etc. I really did not expect that lmao.

It opened so many doors, and introduced us to a bunch of cool people in the open-source community in India!

IndiaFOSS, conducted by FOSS United, is one of the biggest open-source conferences in India, and past speakers include people like Zerodha CTO Kailash Nadh, ente CEO Vishnu Mohandas, and so many other great engineers. The kind of people whose talks and blog posts you read!!

So we submitted a proposal because we thought it would be interesting to talk about Surge, but we genuinely didn’t expect it to get accepted. But it did :)

Our talk is called “Bad Internet, Good Software”, and we’ll be talking about all the weird networking and performance problems we ran into while building Surge.

We’re also thinking what to do with Surge next.

Going forward we plan to extract the core surge engine and develop it as an independent library We are also thinking about what we can be built on top of surge core.

If you use Surge, have a feature request, or just have advice for us, please let us know.

If any of you are going to IndiaFOSS this year, come say hi :)

P.S. my friend and I are also looking for internships/full-time opportunities, so if you or your team is hiring, please reach out.

Back in January this year, I made a post about Surge, an open-source download manager/library written in Go. When I wrote that post, we had no stars, no releases, no users.

We mostly built it because our college internet sucked, we wanted to solve a problem we had, and we thought maybe it would look good on our resumes lol. I expected it to get like a 50-100 stars which would be awesome.

Since then we have 3400+ stars, 150+ forks, and people have actually started using it, contributing to it, reporting bugs, suggesting features, etc. I really did not expect that lmao.

It opened so many doors, and introduced us to a bunch of cool people in the open-source community in India!

IndiaFOSS, conducted by FOSS United, is one of the biggest open-source conferences in India, and past speakers include people like Zerodha CTO Kailash Nadh, ente CEO Vishnu Mohandas, and so many other great engineers. The kind of people whose talks and blog posts you read!!

So we submitted a proposal because we thought it would be interesting to talk about Surge, but we genuinely didn’t expect it to get accepted. But it did :)

Our talk is called “Bad Internet, Good Software”, and we’ll be talking about all the weird networking and performance problems we ran into while building Surge.

We’re also thinking what to do with Surge next.

Going forward we plan to extract the core surge engine and develop it as an independent library We are also thinking about what we can be built on top of surge core.

If you use Surge, have a feature request, or just have advice for us, please let us know.

If any of you are going to IndiaFOSS this year, come say hi :)

P.S. my friend and I are also looking for internships/full-time opportunities, so if you or your team is hiring, please reach out.

TL;DR: Built Surge to fix bad college internet; it grew to 3400+ stars, and now we’re speaking at IndiaFOSS. Also looking for internship/full-time opportunities.

Back in January this year, I made a post on this subreddit about Surge, an open-source download manager/library written in Go. When I wrote that post, we had no stars, no releases, no users.

We mostly built it because our college internet sucked, we wanted to solve a problem we had, and we thought maybe it would look good on our resumes lol. I expected it to get like a 50-100 stars which would be awesome.

Since then we have 3400+ stars, 150+ forks, and people have actually started using it, contributing to it, reporting bugs, suggesting features, etc. I really did not expect that lmao.

It opened so many doors, and introduced us to a bunch of cool people in the open-source community in India!

IndiaFOSS, conducted by FOSS United, is one of the biggest open-source conferences in India, and past speakers include people like Zerodha CTO Kailash Nadh, ente CEO Vishnu Mohandas, and so many other great engineers. The kind of people whose talks and blog posts you read!!

So we submitted a proposal because we thought it would be interesting to talk about Surge, but we genuinely didn’t expect it to get accepted. But it did :)

Our talk is called “Bad Internet, Good Software”, and we’ll be talking about all the weird networking and performance problems we ran into while building Surge.

We’re also thinking what to do with Surge next.

Going forward we plan to extract the core surge engine and develop it as an independent library We are also thinking about what we can be built on top of surge core.

If you use Surge, have a feature request, or just have advice for us, please let us know.

If any of you are going to IndiaFOSS this year, come say hi :)

P.S. my friend and I are also looking for internships/full-time opportunities, so if you or your team is hiring, please reach out.

Keybase proof

I am:

• supercoolpencil on reddit.
• supercoolpencil on keybase.

Proof:

hKRib2R5hqhkZXRhY2hlZMOpaGFzaF90eXBlCqNrZXnEIwEgozKzqBV1Ne6l8Xjycjz6axdFTikEAwvoBjKUYi79czgKp3BheWxvYWTESpcCBsQgo2PRildzR+RZkbeOGRYp69GgD+Dv9r7fcD3PIOSotWnEIHAPz6dW0Kb/o93PN5P1Rw8WFwBrVDl2HhAoQ0z0nqmmAgHCo3NpZ8RA7HqNHyu4q4tLA30w4nZdYJOFuG+ErD4TSIJnv+j00nZGKYjUJlEJ0mxDV1JyFgUTaRbSgvQa9vp5/wpKzynxBKhzaWdfdHlwZSCkaGFzaIKkdHlwZQildmFsdWXEIHvovlyfBPV6OcYTXHSmEop1UJBZogZQu6z43sqTQbgzo3RhZ80CAqd2ZXJzaW9uAQ==

I use Ubuntu for almost everything (except gaming 😞), but I need a reliable way to read (and eventually write) my ext4 partitions from Windows. There are some existing tools out there, but I'm thinking of building my own implementation from the ground up, mostly as a deep dive into filesystem internals.

I’ve been doing a lot of low-level systems programming in Go lately, so I've got a decent grasp on memory management and bit-twiddling. But filesystems are a whole different beast.

current roadmap:

• start with a read only
• traverse extent trees and HTrees for massive directories
• mount it as a read-only virtual drive using WinFSP
• implement block allocation and eventually JBD2 journaling

A few questions for anyone who has ideas :

• I'm heavily leaning toward Go for the concurrency and easy struct unpacking, wrapping it with WinFSP via cgofuse. Am I going to regret not doing this in C or Rust when it comes to memory mapping raw blocks?
• implementing the JBD2 protocol for safe writes is gonna be the main challenge. Is it feasible for a solo dev to build write support?
• Any specific edge cases with ext4 legacy baggage I should watch out for on day one?

Any advice, reality checks, or recommended reading (currently digging through the kernel docs and lwext4) would be hugely appreciated.