I've been doing IT for twenty-five years, in just about every role you can
name. I'm originally from Sydney, but I've spent the last four years in
Launceston, Tasmania, starting again from scratch with nothing but me and my cat.
Linux and macOS, mostly. Most of the job is making sure a person never has
to touch the same thing twice. When I've done it properly you don't notice me
at all, the servers are up, nothing's on fire, and nobody's thinking about
the bloke keeping it that way.
Everything I put out here started as something that annoyed me. The cleanup
scripts came from setting up the same machine for the hundredth time. The
sysadmin knife came from having a dozen tabs open to do one job. The POE
marketer I built for a mate, for a game I used to play. It's due for its own
round of updates, though it's not as old as it looks. Most of the rest I still
run myself.
A while back I held a black belt in one martial art and rocked up to train in
another where I was a complete beginner. People treated me with more respect
than a beginner had any right to, and I couldn't work out why. I asked my
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu professor about it and he told me I had a black belt mind.
That stuck. Twenty years later it still shapes how I work. A belt or a title
has never impressed me half as much as someone who genuinely understands the
thing in front of them. I won't fake an answer I don't have, and when someone
with a big ego gets going, I'm usually happy to sit back and let them run.
"Look to the leader, follow the leader." Find the people doing it
properly and watch them closely. Most of what I know, I picked up that way.
I've run online communities for a long time too, international ones, a whole
swathe of them. All up I'm responsible for administrating just south of eighty
thousand people. But Home is my gated community, the one I
actually live in, where I spend all of my time. The rest I leave to good tech
and good people. The idea isn't complicated: have a good time without
tiptoeing around. No manufactured drama, no language police, no politics at
the door. I don't care which way you lean and I'm not telling you which way I
do. Be a person, be a decent one if you can manage it, and we'll get on fine.
I've got room for nearly everyone, including a few of the difficult ones,
because people change more often than they get credit for.
Dark humour is non-negotiable. No lines, no limits. If that makes you wince,
the two of us were never going to work out.
Home has lived under two names,
latenight.gg and
myplace.gg, and I renamed it
to better match the people in it and the way the place had grown. Same room,
different sign on the door.
The safety side is handled by a pile of bots I've built on top of some
seriously good tech and APIs, all of it shaped around how this particular room
actually behaves rather than some generic moderation kit. There's also a fair
bit of Discord's own machinery working away in the background that nobody ever
notices, and on top of that, people are more predictable than they'd like to
think. Most of the time the place runs itself and the tech is there for when
it doesn't.
I say most of the time because I still get to spend my downtime in the same
place I work, which is more than most people can say. I've never cared about
member counts. I care about the quality of the people far more than the
quantity of them, and I won't trade that away to make a number bigger.
Past that I'll keep my mouth shut, it's not the wild west, put it that way.
People end up where they're meant to. Sometimes that's their own doing.
Sometimes it's mine, or a few thousand people just like me, working in a
field most will never see or understand. We're an enigma. Cue the spooky
music.
