Writings (and occasional rantings) by a boy who doesn't like social media.

Great Smoky Mountains - Western edge of North Carolina

Why NotLinkedIn?
Social media isn't free. It comes with a cost: we and data are the content. Add to it over-stimulation, need for likes, dopamine addiction, fake news, and an absurd amount of advertising. In my opinion, social media has grossly larger costs than benefits. Modern web too has gotten bamboozled with advertisements and over-the-top displays. There are benefits to web 2.0 like the IaaS EC2 server that I'm hosting this on, and APIs, and other neat things. But we don't have to accept the awful aspects just to have the good ones.

I'm not opposed to networking, nor tasteful ads, I'm not trying to deny Google their meal ticket. I'm not a luddite: I work in the technology sector. But I choose not to participate in social media.

Project goals and influences:
Create a minimalist asocial media space, mostly anonymous, to act as practical project for full stack web dev learning.
I don't care for unnecessary clutter and bombastic web elements. And I need to be able to serve from a toaster.

Technologies used:
AWS EC2, Apache, mod-wsgi, Debian Linux, bash, git, SSH, HTML, Bootstrap, Django, Python, and SQLite.
This site does not use cookies, mostly because I haven't identified a plausible reason to do so.
If you are an attacker or a 'security researcher', I'm making your life easier by explaining the architecture of this site. Obscurity isn't security, yada yada, but if you want to hack it for the lolz, why don't I buy you a coffee instead and you can tell me what I can do to improve it?

Summer 2023: I am casually interested in exploring new career options. Things are still good with my long-term employer, but I'm starting to see an end date approaching. I haven't yet figured out how to get email from and to my domain. Will do that soon. On the interim, please stick to smoke signals.

Updates:
June 2023 - added/updated content. Made a bit more professional.
Jan 2023 - added more content, removed metal and kg placeholder pages, not a priority. Added current listening to right side of blog page.
Jan 2023 - added helper functions to assist with content creation and updating. Still needs work, but significantly better than it was.
Q4 2023 - images now work, supports HTTPS, resolves from domain
Prior to Q4 2023 - a lot of learning and experimentation, several recursive rounds of bringing all the tech together.