Hello, my name is Val~

I’m Val Packett (she/her) from Buenos Aires, Argentina 🇦🇷 and purple is my natural hair color (:

These days I work on desktop and graphics virtualization for Qubes OS and related projects, daily drive linux-next on a bunch of Arm devices, and obsess over the local-first peer-to-peer free desktop future that is our chance against the Silly-Con Valley overlords.

My areas of interest in technology include the hardware-software interface, VMMs and hypervisors, platform bring-up, open hardware, functional programming, type systems, security engineering, image-based OS distributions, free desktop environments, P2P networking, CRDTs, and more.

Outside of the software world, I’m into 3D printing, photography, cycling and urbanism, progressive politics and local activism, and probably something else I’m forgetting. I also run A/V for local mini-conferences.

Because this needs to be said these days… I strongly dislike generative “AI” and all kinds of slop.

Projects

• SoundFixer

  

  Firefox add-on for fixing broken sound on YouTube and beyond, recommended by Mozilla ✦ read more →

• TiddlyPWA

  Secure offline storage and cross-device synchronization solution for TiddlyWiki 5 ✦ read more →

• systemstat

  

  Rust library for cross-platform system information and statistics collection ✦ read more →

• secstr

  

  Rust library for conveniently storing sensitive information in memory ✦ read more →

A few more projects

• microformats2-parser

  

  Haskell library and HTTP API for parsing for the Microformats 2 semantic HTML markup syntax ✦ read more →

• argon2ian

  Size-optimized WebAssembly build and async wrapper for the Argon2 password hash ✦ read more →

• evscript

  Sandboxed scripting environment for evdev input device tricks ✦ read more →

• devd-rs

  

  Rust library for listening to FreeBSD device hotplugs, used by Firefox ✦ read more →

• eslint-plugin-pug

  

  ESLint plugin that adds support for inline scripts in Pug templates ✦ read more →

• clj-http-fake

  

  Helper for faking clj-http requests in testing ✦ read more →

• pcre-heavy

  

  Haskell regular expressions library based on PCRE with support for multiple matches and replacements ✦ read more →

• httpotion

  

  Elixir HTTP client convenience library (deprecated because the underlying library is unmaintained) ✦ read more →

Even more projects can be found on my forge accounts (never mind the temporary forks, abandoned experiments, old names and usernames):

• Codeberg valpackett
• GitHub valpackett
• GNOME valpackett
• Freedesktop valpackett

Package repository accounts

• crates.io valpackett
• npm valpackett
• Hackage valpackett
• Hex.pm valpackett
• Clojars valpackett
• RubyGems valpackett
• PyPI valpackett

Contributions

• Linux

  Worked on SoC support, device trees, driver improvements, and more ✦ read more →

• Wayland

  Ported compositors to FreeBSD, worked on Wayfire, improved Wayland support in apps ✦ read more →

• Firefox

  Improved Linux/Unix support with kinetic scrolling, GPU power savings, and more ✦ read more →

• FreeBSD

  Worked on graphics, input, support in upstream projects, Arm platform bring-up and more ✦ read more →

Latest blog posts

Find me elsewhere

• Fedi @valpackett@treehouse.systems
• Flickr valpackett
• Lobste.rs valpackett
• Printables @valpackett

Contact me

• Email val@packett.cool
• Matrix @valpackett:mozilla.org
• Discord @valpackett
• Signal valpackett.69

There is no PGP key here because encrypted email is rather silly. If you’d like to report a sensitive security vulnerability in any of my projects, just message me on Signal or Matrix.

Maybe slightly less silly: aspe:val.packett.cool:DV7YKMH5QMHF5ZVU5UUSIXXXMI.