What Is This Place
my hope is for this place to be a home of sorts. so, welcome to my home. don't expect any stilted professionalism here, but i hope you will find care, sincerity and the closest approximation to authenticity of which this medium permits.
besides the blog, you can find me here:
- Matrix: @colin:uninsane.org
- XMPP/Jabber: colin@uninsane.org
- ActivityPub: @colin@fed.uninsane.org
- Email: (my name)@uninsane.org
- Gitea (code hosting/collaboration): https://git.uninsane.org
the sources for uninsane.org itself live here.
if you have comments or questions about anything you read here -- or if you're just generally curious and want to know me better -- do reach out. i'm a huge believer in the web as a tool for like-minded individuals to come together, and if you're the type to be reading "about" pages on a blog like this then we may be quite alike :-)
the big email providers don't always play nicely with smaller hosts like me though, so please consider the other options above first, or monitor your spam folder for my response after mailing.
and if you want to foray into Matrix/ActivityPub/etc but don't know where to set up, i'm happy to host you. crawl through the above links til you hit a 'register' button, then use that and send a short introduction through any other means so i know you're not spam.
Yes, but I Want to Know About You
if you haven't figured it out yet, my name's Colin. i've always loved to tinker, particularly with machines. after a decade of mostly-solo DIY work, only recently am i exploring (and loving) the more collaborate forms of it and the social context of it all.
after spending my teens coding video games and synthesizers, i continued on to study Electrical Engineering and especially digital VLSI, colloquially, "chip design". since then i've worked a couple jobs at mid-size tech companies, but increasingly i struggle to reconcile my old days of exploring and building things by hand with the broader norm of black-box products delivered to passive consumers. why can't i build the CPU for this server the same way i build the software for it? in the extreme, why can't i build my own physical home the same way i build my digital home here? let's eliminate this division between "producer" and "consumer" and be both at the same time: that's what i'm about.
Work With Me
if you're a part of some project broadly aligned with the ideals you see represented here, please contact me! i'm available for full-time or part-time work; salaried or contract, fixed-term or ongoing. i can generally find my way through any area of the computing stack which doesn't require a literal PhD, given enough time, but the skills i've most honed include:
- Rust, C/C++, Python
- Systems engineering, networking, systems administration
- Signal processing, numerical approximation, etc
Attributions
special thanks to the following for powering this blog:
- SIL for providing the Gentium font used on this site.
- Zola for providing the Markdown => HTML Static Site Generator.
- nginx for developing the software which serves you this content over HTTP.
- nixos for developing the operating system of this host.
- Raspberry Pi Foundation for developing the hardware which hosts all the above.
- the thousands of dreamers out there contributing in every manner to the open web upon which all these things depend.