I like over engineering as a hobby, it keeps me up-to-date with the times regardless of my $dayjob tasks. My home network is over engineered with UniFi backed by Cat 8 and 2.5G switches with fiber terminating on prem. However, one of the things I love to add to my web pages is the response header of X-Clacks-Overhead “GNU Terry Pratchett”, no relation to GPL. It’s my little way of honoring an awesome author Terry Pratchett.
Working in technology often takes away the magic of things for others to discover, what do you do to put a bit more of the magic back in this industry just for fun?
Well, personally, I never really learned anything about linux system administration so I just nabbed myself an old laptop and started messing with Arch. I think everyone in that space massively underestimates how complex it is– Like, sure, OK, I figured out Systemd-boot eventually, I have this thing running, now… wait, Sudo isn’t part of coreutils? Wait, the kernel doesn’t include anything for power management? (Oh my god this battery is shockingly garbage according to tdp) Wait, I’ve got to get something to handle networking before I leave the install utility… Oh hey I can’t get manuals because I don’t have man…
Next I want to see if Wayland can do anything without a compositor (can it maybe just show a single application with no way of backing out because there’s literally no window management?) Probably just doesn’t work on it’s own but I’ll see.
The major trouble is just finding information. Archwiki is wonderful but I still feel like I need to do even more research than that most of the time.