From VS Code to Helix
I created the website you’re reading with VS Code. Behind the scenes I use Astro, a static site generator that gets out of the way while providing nice conveniences.
Blog
This page lists my longer and more detailed posts, but you can also find shorter posts on the latest news page. Thoughts, TILs and gear reviews live there.
Cloud tech makes sense on-prem too
In the previous post, we talked about the importance to have a flexible homelab with Proxmox, and set it up. Long story short, I only have a single physical server but I like to experiment with new setups regularly. Proxmox is a baremetal hypervisor: a piece of software that lets me spin up Virtual Machines on top of my server, to act as mini servers.
Over engineering my homelab so I don't pay cloud providers
After years of self-hosting on a VPS in a datacenter, I’ve decided to move my services at home. But instead of just porting services, I’m using this as an opportunity to migrate to a more flexible and robust set up.
Loading credentials from Bitwarden with direnv
When working on my homelab, I regularly need to pass credentials to my tools. A naive approach is to just store the token in clear text, like for example in this opentofu snippet.
Kubernetes is not just for Black Friday
I self-host services mostly for myself. My threat model is particular: the highest threats I face are my own incompetence and hardware failures. To mitigate the weight of my incompetence, I relied on podman containers to minimize the amount of things I could misconfigure. I also wrote ansible playbooks to deploy the containers on my VPS, thus making it easy to redeploy them elsewhere if my VPS failed.
Why is my Raspberry Pi 4 too slow as a server?
I self-host services on a beefy server in a datacenter. Every night, Kopia performs a backup of my volumes and sends the result to a s3 bucket in Scaleway’s Parisian datacenter.
Deep Work reconciled me with personal growth books
I’m usually not a huge fan of personal growth books. As I pointed out in my Blinkist review, most books of this genre are 300 pages long when all the content would fit on 20. I read Deep Work by Cal Newport, with an open but skeptical mind.
Social media affect me more than I thought
I’ve struggled with focus earlier this year. I felt pulled in all directions, overwhelmed by the world, and generally miserable. I decided to abstain from using social media for a week to see if anything would change.
Prosthetics that don't betray
Tech takes a central place in our lives. Banking, and administrative tasks are happening more and more online. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to get through life without a computer or a smartphone. They have become external organs necessary to live our life.
You can still own music
In the 2000s I spent a lot of time with headphones on. Most of my pocket money went into CDs. I bought them, ripped them, loaded them into my music player and listened to them countless times.
FOSDEM for Work and for Fun
This year again I have been going to FOSDEM for work, but also to record a couple interviews and to hang out with some old friends.
Why are open source nonprofits so weird?
In the open source industry, creating an American nonprofit to serve and fund a project is not uncommon. These structures can choose a fiscal status depending on their needs within a wide range defined by the IRS. The 501(c)(3) status is widespread in the industry. These structures must follow specific legal and tax requirements, which means that sometimes, their interests can seem misaligned with the project they originate from.
Obsidian for the part-time contractor
I’m working as a contractor for the GNOME Foundation in addition to my regular job at the Matrix.org Foundation. Keeping track of tasks, decisions, and time spent on a project can become quite difficult when it’s not clearly time-boxed as “working for GNOME every Thursday” but looks like “working for GNOME a few hours each day.”
Aiming for a Big Bounce in the GNOME Foundation
The GNOME Foundation has been operating at a loss for several years and has a dysfunctional relationship with its community. As the Foundation started hitting its reserves, it needed to change course. A five-year Strategic Plan is a useful aspirational document that hints at the priorities, but it’s not an operational plan.
Open-source is a chainsaw
Open-source is popular among software engineers and has been for decades. But far from a silver bullet that automatically makes everything better, open-source is a double-edged sword. It can make wonderful, sustainable projects or break the teams behind them.
Welcoming feedback, where it belongs
My website is my digital public face. It is the first impression visitors get of me when browsing it. I’m careful about what I publish on my site since it impacts my public image. It is a one-way street, on purpose, but it doesn’t mean I’m not open to feedback.
Writing is hard, so I got help
I’m not a native English speaker. I make grammar mistakes, and I write convoluted sentences. This can muddy my message. I can nag colleagues and friends to proofread my prose, but I want to be mindful of their time. I decided to find a tool to help me write better English instead.
Tracking what works, not people
The Matrix Foundation is in charge of various activities revolving around Matrix. One of the most important activities to make Matrix a mainstream protocol is lowering the barrier to entry for the general public. The Matrix.org website is a critical step of the onboarding: this is what people will stumble upon when they look up “what is Matrix chat” or “chatting on Matrix” in a search engine.
Escaping surveillance capitalism, at scale
Our relationship with computers and phones has changed. We used to rely on software installed locally on our computers, and are now shifting towards a model based on services and companion apps, sometimes with free tiers and subscriptions.
A CRM for the Matrix Foundation
The Matrix.org Foundation is a non-profit. It carries out costly programs which are only supported by donations. The Foundation’s biggest donor by far has been Element since the Foundation’s early days. Individual donors have supported the Foundation since the very beginning as well, before the Foundation opened up more recently to corporate sponsorship.
Should you check SSH fingerprints?
You just set up a new server, and you want to SSH into it to start configuring it. You open your terminal, use the ssh command to connect remotely into it and… you get greeted by a prompt telling you the authenticity of the host can’t be established.
My server can burn, my services will run
When I was a kid, our house got burgled three times. Our most valuable belongings were taken, our safe place put upside down, and our minds were scarred. This had a deep impact on my relationship with belongings: I want as little of them as possible, and I want them to be easy to replace.
Syncing Notes with Obsidian
In a previous post I mentioned my quest for an interoperable successor to OneNote, and how I ended up settling with Obsidian. I often braindump in bed, before picking up the ideas and fleshing them out on a computer the next day. This means I need to synchronise Obsidian between my computers and phone.
I don't want to host services (but I do)
I don’t want to self-host, and even worse: I think most individuals shouldn’t host services for others. Yet, I am self-hosting services and I even teach people how to do it.
A book in 15 minutes - Blinkist review
Blinkist is a paid service that gives you access to their summaries of popular books. Pick a book from their collection, and 15 to 30 minutes later you should know the key ideas behind the book.
OneNote but Interoperable
When I worked as a consultant, I loved OneNote on the Windows 7 machine I had to use. When moving to Windows 10 OneNote had become a version mess between the free and paid one… and then work allowed me to move to another operating system. Needless to say non-Windows versions of OneNote are not as feature rich nor usable as the one I was used to.
The Website Existential Crisis
After several months of work, I recently spearheaded the release of the new matrix.org website. The website refresh was long overdue. It started as a project to pay off tech debt, and I decided to take it as an opportunity to redesign it entirely.
GNOME moves away from GIMPnet
The GNOME community has become a Matrix-first community some time ago, and we kept the bridges to our historical IRC network gimpnet as a convenience for people who were more comfortable using it. The GNOME community is going to move away from GIMPnet… which doesn’t mean we’re going to severe ties with IRC entirely.
Scaling the Foundation to Contribute to GNOME
This article follows one published by a former director, Allan Day, who detailed the evolution of the Board of Directors. The article you’re reading goes further on what I believe is needed to help us scale the Foundation to become an active contributor to the GNOME Project, beyond its traditional support activities.
Adopting Matrix at the GNOME Foundation
The topic of our Instant Messaging platform of choice is quite old. In May 2021 I covered the history of IRC and Matrix in the GNOME Community.
Funding decentralised/local-first applications for GNOME
The GNOME Foundation has not been giving as much news as we wish it has, but doesn’t mean nothing happened!
Encrypted Backups on a Raspberrypi with a Sleepy Disk
I self-host a few services. It’s easy to put services online, but self-hosting properly in the long run is difficult. A part of self-hosting properly is having backups and monitoring. In this article I’m going to show you how I make sure to get off-site backups, with a Raspberry Pi at home pulling data from my VPS. There’s room for improvement, and if you have constructive comments on how I can do better I’d be happy to hear them!
Owning Your Matrix Account
When we deployed our Matrix instance for GNOME, we were really used to IRC. We did not think through all the ways people would use an account for, and left registrations too open. As a consequence, many people created an account on our instance because they like the GNOME Project, and started using it as a personal account.
Problems we faced on GNOME’s Matrix instance
This post follows an introduction to Matrix with e-mails, where I explain that Matrix is a federated system.
On the Sustainability of the GNOME Foundation
Following a blog post by GNOME Foundation’s president Robert McQueen about The Next Steps for the GNOME Foundation, GNOME Designer and Foundation’s board member Allan Day opened a discussion for the board to issue recommendations to the GNOME Foundation members when voting for a candidate.
Matrix for Instant Messaging
The Matrix protocol is full of concepts sometimes hard to grasp. In this post I’m going to try to cover how it’s used in the context of messaging, how close to e-mail it can feel, and how decentralisation is achieved in the open safely. For the sake of simplicity and ease of understanding I might lie to you sometimes: this post is aimed at non-experts.
Running for the GNOME Foundation's Board of Directors
Like many, I started my involvement in the GNOME community as an end-user. Eventually, I wanted to give back to this project I loved. I wanted to see both the project and the community strive. We already had and still have many excellent developers who work hard to implement the vision of our talented design team. Those are not areas where my contribution would make a difference. I started helping with translations. For this activity I have regularily been chasing maintainers for string freezes, or to ask for explanations when strings didn’t make sense for me.
On the “Libera Chat” Spam
First, of course, we know that despite what the spam indicated the spam did not actually come from Libera Chat teams. It comes from imbeciles who obviously wanted to give Libera Chat a bad image by flooding all sorts of disgusting messages.
IRC, Matrix, and thanks for all the kicks
I’ve come to talk with you about instant messaging platforms and peaceful coexistence. This is a pretty heated issue, so I count on everyone to keep the conversation constructive so we can shape our future platform together in a positive way!