i studied philosophy, literature, and law in school and never really got a handle on computers, despite my interest

but a little over a year ago i heard about hackernews

i think it was the calm design of the site that made me become a regular; within no time, i had strong opinions on systemd & sysvinit, on functional & object-oriented programming, on emacs & vim (actually i still don't yet have a handle on emacs but i'm working on it...)

the first thing ya'll inspired me to do was to set up a matrix instance on a vps to replace whatsapp for my circle of friends. it was hard, for me, at first, to set up, but i quickly got addicted to the feeling of ownership that came with being the admin. that alone i would say is worth a huge thank you, but you've inspired me to do even more:

- switched to MX Linux as my daily driver

- started learning emacs and trying to do as much as possible within emacs

- built a server from spare parts and configured debian from scratch

- replaced netflix with jellyfin

- hosted my urbit and made it accessible via any web browser

- set up a minio backend for my urbit

- replaced spotify with navidrome

- hosted a pigallery2 (for my friend who is a photographer)

- created for myself a pseudo-unified computing environment using syncthing

- everything proxied with caddy

just today i set up miniflux and https://github.com/vasanthv/talk

i look forward to hearing about new projects that i can deploy to improve my friends' lives; i hear about them here

but it's not even just what you've encouraged me to do: once i had my server working i became consumed by the idea that i could do it all myself, so i started to try to self-host email. you all helped encourage me to give up that nightmare and just pay a real company to do it for me

this points at maybe what i'm most thankful for: i have a much deeper and more sophisticated understanding of the technology stack i interact with at any given time. even if i'm not "in control", at least knowing how i'm not in control gives a sense of security

more than that, i'm able to impress my nephew, a supposed computer genius, by simply regurgitating the latest talking points from HN. maybe this is the most valuable benefit i've derived so far....

one of the other things i've done is to self-host a ghost installation for the benefit of my friends, john and borka. they basically live like monks for the benefit of the preservation of the amazon rainforest. with HN's help, i have been able to set them up with a website:

https://RioMomon.rhizoma.zone

sometimes at this time of year people look for something to which to donate. the nice thing about rio momon is that all of the money goes directly towards the mission (web hosting & web dev costs, for example, are borne by me -- and i am able to do it easily, because HN taught me)

thank you!