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Welcome!

The audience for a web log

When writing, a key question is: Who am I writing this for?

Well, this is supposed to become a blog – a web log –, so by definition it’s more a personal journal than it is meant to be consumed by other readers.

Another way to put it: As I’m writing for myself, the intended audience could be inferred to be geeky and tech-savvy, with interests in Unix and all its offspring, inter-networking, programming, web architecture and free/open source in general.

Still, I do hope that other beings find my entries useful every now and then.

This is also why I’ll be writing in English, even though it’s not my native tongue. If you notice something wrong, please let me know, as I’m always looking to improve my English skills.

Topics

Another key question is what to write about.

The decision to give blogging yet another shot came when I realized this: In my 25+ years in tech, I have encountered some pretty cool things and some pretty weird things, and even came up with a few of those myself.

Unfortunately, I’ve never sung songs about those, I’ve never made a big deal of telling anyone about it, so… I forgot! If you’d ask me point blank to name one thing, I couldn’t. In other words: the main objective here is to help my future self remember.

The other objective is to help myself think, as writing about something is an incredibly useful tool to improve my understanding of it.

So tl;dr: This is going to be strictly about my encounters in the aforementioned domains: documenting bugs as I find them, tech side-projects and maybe some musings about other developments in the tech space.

“Naming things is hard”

From my perspective, tech folks are getting younger and younger. So it’s easy to forget that I’ve seen things that younger tech folks just haven’t been exposed to. Like modems. Or display devices that are deeper than ten centimeteres. Or telephones with a dial plate. Or datasettes.

And while I’ve never used real teletype devices myself, I like the name because it’s an apt concept – I’m kinda tele-typing to your head. And (virtual) terminals, aka vty or tty, are a key facility in Unix.

So there you go.