Hello everyone, I am here as the result of discussions with @stman @vidak @theruran and others on the fediverse. I don't actually have the same character restrictions over there because I run a pleroma server with a 5000 character limit, but I appreciate the mastodon restrictions can make expression difficult (worse yet are twitter restrictions). I ran a mastodon for a little while but I found pleroma and soapbox had a nice feel to it.
I am a mostly self taught systems engineer working primarily on linux systems. Most of my work is making systems talk to one another but I also work on user interfaces although primarily via web applications. I don't touch the physical machines I work on (an ocean separates us), but I work do with hardware too (not at the same level as Frederic or probably anyone else here).
I am 41 and I started messing with computers in my 10+ years at one level or another. That said my professional computer career is only a little over decade. I have also been a mechanic, carpenter, and various retail type positions and computering has been mostly a hobby. I have been using Linux almost exclusively since somewhere around 2004 or 5. I am a huge fan of free software and more recently free software primarily because I have trust issues. Not that I have reviewed every line of code I've ever run as I think that in the current paradigm that's impossible, but I trust the community approach more than proprietary systems. Unfortunately free software has not protected the world from centralization, and in fact it may have helped since many of the biggest corporations are in fact powered by a lot of open source technology. This is not to say I think free software licensing is to blame or we need to do anything with licensing to prevent this behavior, but it's obvious that AWS, Cloudflare, Facebook, Twitter, and others have stood on the backs of the community. They have contributed as well (Facebook's HHVM and Twitter's chronos framework for mesos come to mind), but I don't know that their contributions equal the damage they have also done to the internet as a whole.
Anyway this is supposed to be about me. I am a novice compared to many of you I am sure. I am here because I find these conversations fascinating, and @stman has managed to find value in my contributions. I don't know how much I can contribute as I do have a lot of other things that occupy my time (especially in the summer months), but I always try and follow along and if I can add anything I will. In general I am a liberty minded person with anarchist tendencies. I don't really think of myself as any particular flavor of anarchist, but hey that's part of anarchy. I think government can work, but it must be limited in scale and scope. I think the scale of power structures today is dangerous for human prosperity. This is true both on and offline.
