About

Welcome to the ~chris. Now is probably a good time for me to admit that doing this with wordpress would have been the right way to do this at the beginning. I’m a software engineer who works with open source systems. This journal is a place for me to write about some of the things that I’ve been doing with open source. My goal is to get to a level of detail that allows you, the reader, to be able to take on the same projects. One goal, at one time, was to teach. Since I started this blog in 2006, I’ve realized that this is really a site for me to record my notes. The software industry has changed. The number of professionals in the industry that not only careĀ that a problem is fixed but also careĀ how a problem has dwindled. There are fewer explorers in software engineering today and this isn’t a bad thing. But it has changed what you find when you try to solve a problem. We no longer reference Evi Nemeth et al’s resource book on Unix System Administration, instead we search Google and find a list of ten or so steps that gets the immediate problem solved. For emphasis, I’m okay with this. There are just enough hyper-curious people around that we can both get a lot of work done and learn new things. I’m one of those hyper-curious people. I want to know both what and why. That means that as a software developer, sometimes I’m slower my peers who can always focus on just getting the job done. I think that the world needs both kinds of people. The intensely goal focused shine when you really need to get things done and I can work that way too. But as a hyper-curious individual, I’m valuable when what you want done is a little different than mainstream.

Even an old dog can learn new tricks. I used to eschew binary packages and I’ve stuck with FreeBSD because of it’s emphasis on building from source. But I definitely stick with binaries these days. That may mean running poudriere and dpq on virtual machines to populate a locate package repository but it is what it is. In the past I concentrated on ix86/amd64 but I’m moving to arm/aarch64 these days. Actually to be honest, so long as I can get llvm or gcc for it, I really don’t care about the instruction set. I spend 90% of my time playing with python3, 3 of course, and divide the rest between javascript, C/C++ and whatever else seems to work best for what I’m doing.