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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I’ve argued this for point for so many years and have become exhausted to the point where I don’t even bother any more.

    Free software advocates, God bless them, are fighting a good fight but we will never see the average computer user giving up functionality for the sake of some computing ideology; whether that ideology be free software, privacy or security focused. I’m glad some people are willing to do so as I believe strongly that the world would not be where it is today if it weren’t for it’s existence offer the last two or three decades. But the reality is that 90% of the world views computers, phones and tablets as tools; a means to achieving an end, not the end in and of itself. There may be some subset of people who are willing to give up some convenience or utility if they believe strongly enough in one of these ideologies, but most of them will never care about the license of their software as long as it gets the job done. But this is precisely why we need people who do care about these ideologies because software freedom ultimately is important and people do benefit from it. It just needs to be as good as, if not better than, it’s non-free counterparts







  • I have my mail server set up as a catch all so you can send to anything at my domain and it’ll land in my inbox. I use this to create usage specific addresses. If it’s something I know will produce spam, I just dev null anything going to that address. I can then also track where a spam source originated. For friends and family who email me regularly; they also know to append the current year to my email address, this allows me to rotate my email address every year.

    I also run spam assassin and implement greylisting as well as blocking IP ranges from countries I know I’ll never receive legitimate mail from… it’s been an evolution.


  • 100%. I’ve been running my own mail server for 10-15 years now and you’re spot on. I’ve wanted to migrate it to a more modern platform but I’m loath to relive the process of configuring postfix and dovecot. DKIM/SPF and Let’s Encrypt certs for IMAPS were also a bit of a headache to get sorted, and warming up the sending IP so gmail would stop sending me to spam… but once that’s all sorted it’s been very very hands off. I log in once in a blue moon to update it but otherwise it just sits and does it’s thing.



  • I consider myself both but I’m progressively leaning more and more professional.

    First off, I’m 100% self-taught. I discovered Linux around 2003 and immediately learned, several times, how not to install it and multiple really good ways of destroying data on a hard drive. I have had the open source / Linux bug ever since.

    I went to school for CS for about two semesters before I dropped out. I then started off my career in IT of all places, I was a helpdesk IT administrator. About 12 years ago I landed a job where most of my responsibilities revolved around Linux servers and workstations (academic research lab). I started learning more about systems automation and configuration management tools/languages/strategies. This constantly lead me down roads involving reading source code for projects that I used day-to-day when something didn’t go right. This lead to filing bug reports and ultimately making a pull-request here or there to fix my own issues.

    Fast forward two jobs and 10 years and I’ve migrated to a role where the majority of my day is writing systems code. Most of it is in Go now but I still maintain a handful of Python/Django applications as well. The majority of the tools I write for work are focused on developer experience, cloud automation and internal CI/CD pipelines. In my personal time, I contribute to a number of open source projects.