Will Sinatra

I build things to understand them, not because I always succeed in that endeavor, but because the endeavor is the point.

That's the short version. The longer version is that I'm a self-taught technologist with a history degree who somehow ended up as a principal-level infrastructure architect, an Alpine Linux maintainer & infrastructure contributor, and a whole load of other similarly interesting manifestations of contributor to various projects like SaltStack, Snapcraft, and Chocolatey. It's a bit of a wild sprawl that comes off as confusing or alarmingly technical, but I swear it's mostly curiosity mixed with tenacity. Plus a fistful of late nights, too much coffee consumption, and a "wait I can do that" mindset.

The Thread

I write software because I believe that creating things is how you engage with the world honestly. I contribute to open source because everything I know was built on the shoulders of people who gave their work freely, and returning that gift is both obligation and privilege. The question for me of how to build well turns out to be inseparable from the question of how to live well in some sense. Aristotle described this as Phronesis, we manifests the things we find virtuous by combining both thought and action. In my mind, there's a direct thread between Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Free and Open Source development. It's a thread I've been chasing my entire professional career and a significant portion of my adult life.

If you read this blog you'll find posts about embedding Lua in Nim, recovering corrupted Windows Vista boot partitions, PXE booting Alpine Linux from RAM, and teaching my son how a stack machine thinks. These are all the same activity. I pull at problems until I understand them, and then I write about what I found so that the next person has a shorter path. That next person might be me a few years later even.

Free & Open Source

All the software I write for myself I write for the community. I am fortunate enough to also be employed at a company that sees true value in OpenSource and actively supports my efforts therein. Some of my contributions are made possible with their support.

I do this because I believe access to technology should be free and easy. I would not have the career I have today if I could not stand on the shoulders of giants. This is my way of returning that favor as best I can. I cannot today count myself amongst people like Linus Torvalds, Douglas Katzman, or Russ Cox, but I hope some day that I may. And if I never attain that lofty dream I will know that I strove to support the free and open source community as best I could throughout my career.

My largest ongoing contribution is maintaining 200+ packages for Alpine Linux, including SBCL, Clojure, Cloud-Init and Salt among many others. I also maintain packages on Snapcraft and have contributed upstream to SaltStack, and several other projects. None of this work would be possible without the support of my loving wife Samantha, my friends both digital and physical who share the same spark I do, and for the wonderful community each of these opensource projects maintain.

How I Got Here

All of that impressive stuff said, I didn't take a conventional path. Like I said I have a bachelor's in history, not computer science. Everything I know technically I learned by doing, by failing, and by inserting myself into problems beyond my ability until they weren't. I started in QSR point-of-sale support, worked through broadcast infrastructure and embedded Linux systems, cofounded a small business, and eventually landed in DevOps where I've built every piece of infrastructure my team uses across a few dozen different companies and counting. We're still growing, and so am I.

The history degree might seem on the surface like a useless arts degree, but it isn't. It taught me to take messy, incomplete sources and construct coherent narratives from them. That's not far from what systems architecture is; taking messy requirements and building something that holds together. My stance has always been that my degree provided me with the skills necessary to teach myself anything, which I am proud to state has been the case.

What I'm Thinking About

Lately I've been preoccupied with a few things: building scio, an MQTT-based infrastructure management system written in Nim with Lua as its configuration language; exploring what permacomputing means for how we build and maintain systems; and reading my way through a backlog of western philosophical works. Nicomachean Ethics is currently up on the docket, though it's slow going reading it during coffee breaks, no matter how frequent those might be!

I also run LegacyLabs, a small group focused on retrocomputing, permacomputing, and homelab tinkering.

Appearances

If you enjoy this blog, you may also be interested in this modest list of talks and conversations:

Zines

I occasionally contribute to zines, and keep local offline readable copies on this server. If you enjoy the content I highly encourage you to check out past and future issues, especially the wonderful submissions in which I don't appear.

If you'd like to interview me, have me present somewhere, or just want to say hello, I'd be delighted to speak with you. I'm easiest to reach via IRC on the OFTC and Libera networks as Durrendal, or via email at durrendal@lambdacreate.com.