Overengineering the Swaybar (and accidentally reinventing scheduling)

Speaker: Thomas Gebert

Room: CC 203

Time: Sat 11:25 am – 11:55 am

Format: Lecture (30 Min + Q&A)

Difficulty: Some experience required

Track: Development & Dev Tools

Presenter Location: In-person

Experience: umpteenth time speaking

Description:

Sway is a popular tiling window manager for Wayland. While its core is solid, it is notably incomplete in several areas.

This talk walks through the speaker’s journey of adding features to Sway to make it feel more complete, exploring increasingly complex code, the evolution of design decisions, and the reasoning behind them. Along the way, the process accidentally veers into reinventing scheduling concepts, offering a fun and insightful look at concurrency, design tradeoffs, and overengineering in practice.

Target Audience:

People with some programming experience

Those with (optional) familiarity writing concurrent software — concurrency concepts will be explained during the talk