I'm not a great developer. I have been copying and pasting the snippet of CSS on this page from page to page. Shameful! (I should put it in its own file, DRY, etc). So, I posted about my iPhone app that interacts with Wikipedia, and about a song I really like. I thought, hey, let's see this in action, and pulled up the song in Apple Music on the iPhone, and tried to use my app to jump to the Wikipedia article I discovered. Not found! Epic failure. So I looked into it.

My app tries to construct a guess of a Wikipedia URL that will work. This is problematic, because song titles as reported by the API for Apple Music can have issues. Long story short - the song, Samba Em Prelúdio performed by Esperanza Spalding, is listed in Apple Music without the accent (u instead of ú). Now that we all have Unicode, we can properly spell foreign words. It seems that Wikipedia can have redirects - little references to a page that intercept possible different spellings, or even completely different names. I interacted with Wikipedia when my Dad died, to update the entry for him. Therefore I had a log in. So I created a suitable redirect for Samba_Em_Preludio to go to Samba_Em_Prelúdio. The Wikipedia powers that be helped me find out how to do it and approved it. Problem solved!

Last year, I discovered that a kernel update to Linux disabled my bluetooth controller on a MacBook Pro from 2014 running Arch Linux. I was curious and learned how to bisect the commit history (perform a binary search on the kernel source code history) and found the actual commit/change that created the problem. I was able to contact the developer and it was fixed. There is a record of this at:
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217651

These are some small ways I've interfaced with the world of Free Software (or open source, if you prefer). The world of software is changing so quickly, the LLMs and GPUs and everything is so different. Still, the idea that code should be treated like scientific research rather than a trade secret remains cool in my eyes.