Updates 2021/Q4

The forth quarter has been packed with personal and professional things. Most of time time went into business related things, as well as personal projects.

Personal things

A big part of my time has gone into updating and extending my own infrastructure. I gave up on e-mail providers and VPN services, and rolled out own services, sharing them with close friends that have been similarly annoyed by today’s surveillance capitalism. I kept some business domains on a paid provider, though, as I’ve noticed that especially Google Mail will mark mails coming from my own service as spam, even though it checks all the trustworthiness marks. I happened to have had similar issues with mails sent from a Migadu account, so I guess that’s just Google being a douche.

For the e-mail service I’m using a privacy-focused hosting provider that I can pay anonymously with XMR and has port 25 open. Also, the mail service has no logs and it’s configured to purge mails automatically and therefor don’t consist of any useful data whatsoever.

The VPN is built as a highly automated and globally available network of Wireguard instances that can be deployed and destroyed within a matter of minutes. I’m using a hosting provider with a Terraform-compatible API for that. The VPN instances don’t log a single line and are nothing more but ephemeral jump hosts.

Additionally I began moving to XMPP and hence created an account on xmpp.co. I might end up rolling my own XMPP as well, depending on how many of my acquaintances might be interested in joining as well.

Other than that I’ve recently published an update on my Linux workstation, which I outfitted with a new keyboard: The RAMA M60-A.

Professional things

I’ve been working on a handful of different ideas that I’m looking forward to launch soon. They’re all digital services that will mainly cater towards folks working professionally in IT, especially the ones in close contact to actual code and operations. Unfortunately I can’t spill the beans on the services just yet, but as soon as I’ve launched the first platform I’ll make sure to update this post, as well as write a dedicated entry, explaining the backstory and some of the problems I’m trying to solve with it.

Initially I started off working together with someone else on one of these ideas, unfortunately collaboration hasn’t turned out as anticipated on either side. The situation has lead me to ask myself, how future collaboration might be looking like. I sought out for advice on this but interestingly it didn’t appear to be something many people were able to give feedback on.

However, as the show must go on, I’m continuing work on the said ideas on my own, at a slightly reduced pace.

Open source projects

Unfortunately, there was no progress on any of my open source projects during this quarter. With personal and professional projects accounting for 80-hour-weeks, I was unable to work on OSS.

As with the professional projects, in open source it seems to have become similarly hard to find people who would not only want to use the software, but contribute to it as well. This is also one of the reasons why even initially successful projects (a.k.a. >7k stars on GitHub) of mine have been left dying.