John is a Software Veteran Writing About Linux and Rust

My career in backend development taught me how systems work from the inside out, but I spent those years using systems other people built. Now I get to ask what if we did it differently, and actually find out

I'm 69 years old and most of my friends are gone. Not from age, but from AIDS. This is the story behind the blog, the Arch install, and a lifetime of building my own things because nobody was going to build them for me.

I loved Pop!_OS and ran 22.04 for years. System76 built something special with that distro, and when they announced they were writing a new desktop en…

I've Spent 43 Years Securing Systems. Here's Why I Don't Trust Software That Can't Say No.

You didn't get hacked. You just bought a bunch of devices that were designed to spy on you. Time to take your network back.

I retired in March 2024 after 40 years of writing software. A decade at Salesforce, and before that a long trail of jobs going back to the early 80s.…

The arguments against Wayland are frozen in 2020. The technology moved on.

Microsoft is training AI on your code without consent. I moved to Codeberg.