Nerd At Heart

Published on: October 03, 2024

I'm a nerd at heart, despite the MBA and history degree, I'll still go for the blinking cursor in a B/W terminal over a library. And two things really excited me on the technology front lately. And they go hand in hand, so I'm keen to share.

First of all a rekindled love for the terminal. It's ridiculously easy to get a full fledged (virtual) machine running where you have a complete Linux distribution running for just $5/month. Thanks to Linode for giving back that feeling I had as a 12 year old messing up the family computer with (trying to) install Slackware (later Arch, Redhat (or Fedora?), and Ubuntu). It's really just click-and-go, no fuzzy nonsense, and you just SSH into it. Brilliant, especially compared to all the upselling fluffy half-broken SAAS interfaces we are forced to deal with nowadays.

Secondly, having this environment so easily and completely available to me without any restrictions, it's super easy to hack around with my AI programming buddies and just deploy whatever. There's limitations (and pre-reqs to get in place) to how well it works, but asking ChatGPT for a copy-paste ready Python script to edit text from the browser and save it on the machine just works. That's unbelievable to me. I managed to get quite far some decade(s ;() ago with Apache, MySQL, and PHP, but this is a whole new world.

The sky is the limit if you're somewhat technically capable and have a bit of patience. Exciting stuff.