Ok ok this is definitely the last post I'll be making on July 20th, 2026.
But I just had to talk about this because of how cool it is.
A little while ago, I was studying the iOS ecosystem (as evidenced by my other post on SwiftNIO). I thought to myself, if I'm going to build my skills in iOS, I probably should try to get familiar with technologies that are used by millions.
What better than VLC?
If you're not aware, VLC is an open-source media player that can run literally anything. If you put a stone tablet into your PC, I'm pretty confident VLC would be able to run it.
So I decided to hop on to the iOS codebase and do a bit of reading. Upon identifying what I thought were vulnerabilities, I decided to build a test suite on my trusty Macbook Air. Then sent my findings in.
Fast forward a couple moons and I receive an email from fkuehne, a doctor that moonlights as one of the core developers on VLC. I hope my parents never find out about him or else I'll have to explain why I was only able to master one discipline!
Seriously though, this is pretty nice.
Here are the commits related to the bugs I found:
https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc-ios/-/merge_requests/1908
Nothing too crazy but this one has real personal significance to me.
I've been a VLC user for an incredibly long amount of time, so it's nice to be able to say that I contributed something tangible to my video player of choice. Now my anime watching experience is 1% safer!
So yeah. I don't have much else to say other than how interesting this was.
Time for me to abandon blogging for a month lol