Gediminas Lelešius

Projects

Various interesting things that I'm working/-ed on. Feel free to drop me a line if you'd like to learn more.

Improving resilience of ActivityPub

2022, Cambridge Bachelor's project

Dissertation. Suggested and supervised by: Dr Anil Madhavapeddy. The idea was to introduce more inter-instance sharing into the ActivityPub protocol (decentralised social networking). Then, the data will be available even when some nodes fail. That should result in a better user experience and encourage more people to host their own instances, making the network more decentralised.

This was done by caching public keys of users in a newly designed Lookup server and having a decentralised network of verifiers to provide trust. Then, Public key cryptography was used to check the integrity of data coming from other instances. I forked Mastodon and modified it to use this system to provide the promised benefits.

Small projects

Build&Run VSCode extension

2020–now
Initialy created as a tool for competitive programmers, it became a simpler alternative to VSCode's built-in build system. Features: compile the program, take input from source file comments and pass it to STDIN, print the output; run multiple times with different inputs, fully customisable build commands; code formatting and more. Install from here.

Improved Signal Desktop app

2021–now
The official Signal chat application lacks some features that other platforms have. However, it's difficult to convince Signal team to implement those. Hence, I forked the official app and added Messenger-like seen bubbles and some other features. Some of them were later added into the main version. Download from here.