# About Me

Hi!  I'm Alex.  I'm a software engineer living near Boston, MA.
My professional career has been quite the journey from developer
tooling to infrastructure/devops to web backends and now data
pipelines.  However, I mostly [blog](/blog) about hobbies.
Things like:

- Exploring niche operating systems like
  [Plan 9](/blog/exploring-plan9.html)
- Perusing the "smolweb" via internet protocols like [Gopher](/blog/burrowing.html)
- Sysadmin-ing [several servers](/blog/starting-a-tilde.html)

Outside of tech, I enjoy playing music, hiking, and a sharing
a good board among friends.

## About This Site

This site is an ever-changing hobby project where I use the
markup and build system as an excuse to learn and/or build new
tools.

In 2020, I [rewrote the site](/blog/my-old-man.html) as a series
of man-pages in [`mdoc(7)`](https://man.openbsd.org/mdoc.7),
writing new blog posts in the language and developing a toolchain
to [support feeds](/blog/use-feeds.html), [text-only versions](/blog/text-only.html),
and eventually a [gopher mirror](/blog/burrowing.html).

At the end of 2021, I really wanted a lower-friction medium to
blog on (akin to the plaintext I was writing on my
[phlog](gopher://alexkarle.com/1/phlog)).  Looking to keep the
site buildable by base OpenBSD as a
[creative limitation](/blog/creative-coding.html),
I took the opportunity to write my own
lightweight markup parser, [`nihdoc`](https://git.sr.ht/~akarle/nihdoc).

For a brief period, this site was a [lookalike](/acme-index.html)
of [Plan 9](https://9p.io/plan9/)'s editor/interface
[Acme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_%28text_editor%29),
but as I haven't used it in a while I've toned it back to
a simple background-color homage :)