My first official job at the beginning of my tech career (late 90s) was working in-house at a small print shop. First and foremost this allowed me to keep teaching myself graphic design. But because I had also been learning early Internet technical stuff, a couple of other things ended up happening.

The first is that I bolted PHP/MySQL onto my knowledge of HTML & CSS. I ended up building an online ordering system to allow customers to reorder business cards dynamically — just plunk name, title, phone number, etc into a form and off we went, since the cards were already designed. (The admin I built was pretty neat, because it could handle capturing arbitrary data for more than one company or card design. This was around the same time as, and I was unaware of, the launch of Vistaprint. In an alternate timeline, we kept going, out startup’d them somehow, and made a bajillion dollars. Instead I discovered that spaghetti code is bad, and learned Django.)

The other is that I became the quasi-sysadmin for the company. I maintained not only the VPS that ran that system, acquiring the other two letters in the LAMP stack (shoutout if you’re a designer, but have also compiled memcache from source for some reason) but also a small LAN with two fileservers, a couple of beefy Xerox digital printers, and a handful of workstations.

Over the next (ugh, how) two decades my knowledge of the inner workings of software has come in very handy. I migrated from print to product designer and from there up the management track, but I’ve always loved the frontend and engineering in general. (I of course still love graphic design, typography, and brand too.)

My knowledge of Linux and systems administration, on the other hand, has lain somewhat dormant. I mean, I’m still ride-or-die with vim, and once spent a few months trying do everything only via the command line (shoutout if you’re a designer but have also read and sent mail with mutt for some reason). But it was somewhere after having kids and also losing a full day trying to get X11 to see my right mouse button where the “only free if your time has no value” catchphrase entered the chat.

Anywho, fast forward to the present, where two things are now true.

One is that nearly every piece of software around us is, in a nutshell, bad. If you’re reading this, I doubt I need to elaborate. Using n now-hideously-bloated products, all run by skeevy techbros who are flailing about trying to lock me in, extract my data, win a stupid platform war, steal my precious attention, and shoehorn magic-sparkle-AI everywhere in a desperate hail-mary attempt to keep printing more money is infuriating, and now well past the point of parody.

The other thing is a few years ago my wife founded a non-profit in the education space, and got generously donated a bunch of decommissioned server motherboards and hard disks from someone who runs a small colo. They sat in the closet for a while, waiting for the kids to be interested. But they never did, so she ended giving me a few.

You, uh, see where this is going, right?