visitor@estherose.online:~$ whoami
Alexis Estherose
Goes by Alyx. Self-hosted infrastructure, Fediverse servers, and legacy protocol bridging.
About
I enjoy tinkering with technology and have a specific fondness for old operating systems, obsolete computer hardware, and various pieces of the internet that most have long since forgotten. I run my own infrastructure including Caddy, snac2, ATProto PDS, and FreeBSD servers, as well as digging into networking, PKI, legacy protocols, and more. I've also recently worked on porting an old HTTP proxy from deprecated OpenSSL to wolfSSL.
I enjoy the retro pieces of the internet, including old Windows systems, classic gaming consoles, CRT displays, archived websites, and obsolete protocols. During this time the internet was composed of a large number of independently operated sites instead of just a few very large sites. I am particularly interested in where "obsolete" begins and what still works if you know what you're doing.
Aside from infrastructure, I enjoy retro PC games, local multiplayer games, Wii/GameCube era games, visual novels, and games with enough character to cause me to spend an unreasonable amount of time analyzing them. Examples include Doki Doki Literature Club. I tend to take a favorite game or character and turn it into a personal project instead of just enjoying it and moving on.
Privacy and ownership come up frequently in many of my endeavors. I prefer infrastructure and software that I can inspect, configure, host, fix, or replace. I also prefer to understand a system and work within its constraints rather than blindly accepting an ecosystem's implicit assertion that its approach is the only correct one.