this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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I have many nerdy friends who have been Linux users for ages. But most of them don't know such a thing as Openwrt exists or have never bothered to give it a try. It's a very fun piece of software to play with and can be extremely useful for routing traffic. Wondering why it isn't more popular/widely used.

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[–] dandroid@sh.itjust.works 41 points 7 months ago

I was actually the lead engineer on an Openwrt router. I hadn't heard of it before that, but at one point I pretty much knew it inside and out. It's been a few years since I left that company, so I'm a bit rusty at this point.

We made tons of custom features for our router. I did the backend and implemented UIs for most of them. The biggest feature I did though was a full REST API to be able to configure the router from a smart home controller, which was the company's main product. I did both the router side (server) and the smart home controller side (client/caller), including the UI on the smart home controller. I spent almost a year on just that feature. But I was damn proud of it by the end.