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.
Follow me on Fedi! ✦
Contact me ↓↓↓
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
Towards a secure peer-to-peer app platform for Clan
Guest post on the Clan project's blog, summarizing my development work on microVMs with GPU acceleration and desktop integration with Wayland and XDG Portals ✦ read more →
Podfox: World's First Container-Aware Browser
A port conflict pushed me to abolish container port forwarding once and for all, making my Firefox talk to Podman's whole network. Also: containerizing dev environments for command-line addicts. ✦ read more →
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.