Vir Invictus

❦ programmer · curator · former chef ❦

I. On the Author

My work focuses on native Linux desktop software. I build with Rust and GTK4, C built with Meson, and Python where the standard library reaches. Everything is local-first by default. I rely on SQLite in WAL mode with a single-writer worker, read-only connection pools, and FTS5 for search. No cloud accounts. No Docker. No Electron. No telemetry.

Where a rule can be a compile error instead of a convention, I make it one. I would rather ship against a hard memory ceiling than an optional benchmark, and I will port a battle-tested architecture with attribution before I invent a new one.

I drive an AI coding harness across the workspace, and I built it a staff: dragon-agents, twenty-four read-only research subagents that map repositories, audit releases, triage CI, and verify a claim before it gates any work. The staff reads and reports; it never writes. The drafting happens at my direction in the main thread, and the deciding happens nowhere else.

Compile-time invariants, test suites, dry-run defaults, single-writer SQLite: agent-drafted code meets the same gates any human patch would. A machine cannot argue its way past a borrow checker, and I wired my workflow so that I cannot either.

I came to this work late. I spent nearly twenty years in restaurants and mining camps before picking up The C Programming Language. I read it at night between shifts because the cover looked serious and I wanted to know what serious looked like. I am a Computer Engineering Technician student now with a CS bachelor’s underway at Algoma; the paperwork is catching up to two decades of practice.

By temperament I am an archivist. I keep a private Calibre library that runs into the four figures, a music collection sorted by hand, and an RSS spool I read every morning. Friends have called the practice shadow librarianship. The catalogue is my own, kept on my own disks, and indexed by my own tools. Most of what I build is designed for people who treat their library as a resource worth maintaining.

The site is named Vir Invictus, the unconquered. I picked it a long time ago and it stuck.

I am open to work, and when the problem is cool enough the rate is a formality; the cool ones are why I got into this. Write to larocque.brandon+outreach@gmail.com.

❦

II. The Collection

Native Linux desktop software sits at the centre, with games, KOReader companions, and small utilities at the edges. Local-first is the default; the throughline is curation. What follows is a selection of the most active work. Atrium is the largest piece in motion. The rest are sorted by category.

Applications

No. 001

Atrium

Rust · GTK4 · tokio · SQLite · shipping · v0.76.0

The native Linux task manager you grow into, not out of. An Org-mode app wearing a Things 3 / OmniFocus disguise: UUIDs on every node, plain-text round-trip, deadlines and schedules and contexts as first-class data, in a fast GTK4 surface styled by vir-gtk that never asks you to open Emacs, with search powered by vir-search.

I. On the Author

II. The Collection

Applications

Books & Calibre

Music & Audio

KOReader

Games & Engines

The Foundry

The rest of the codex

III. Dispatches