It’s me, Alice. I’ve been meaning to make this website for a while. I’ve been meaning to make a lot for a while. I’ve had a strange year for mental health, and this is going to be first an exercise in helping pull myself out and lifting myself up. Every other concern is secondary.

That is probably an atrocious way to open things on a professional website, but I am willing to do so partially because I am willing to make a bet about the post-LLM internet: we are all going to find a premium in human connection. So, rather than smoothing myself for any potential employer, and rather than producing an Authenticity(tm) for some parasocial connection, I think I will attempt to do something real. And, if this does prove a mistake, at least it will be a genuine attempt to conduct myself in the spirit of what the internet was supposed to be in the first place.

I have found myself in a strange place. I spent a few years immersing myself, straight out of bar work, in the German hacker scene in a way that has permanently altered my understanding of the world, and how we should approach our passage through it. Not for its anarchist principles, nor its queer acceptance nor its approach to building non-violent social spaces. The change came in a new, genuinely fresh, willingness to just try something. Even if I have barely the faintest idea of what I am doing. It has been liberating.

People have an interesting concept of hacking. We imagine a nerdy, spindly young man with a laptop and a hoodie, furiously tapping away at a laptop as if his fingers are hammers and the keys the wall of a bank vault. The first thing you learn is that that isn’t remotely true. Most hacking far more closely resembles glitching Pokemon Red than a breathless “I’m in”. You go to the events. You see people hacking their washing machines with a flashlight and a dream. You see people 3D printing cat ears for one and all. You see coding courses, and DIY robots.

You also see cheese tasting. And that’s where the real magic reveals itself. Hacking isn’t just playing with circuitry. It is, fundamentally, a relationship to the things you own and the things you do. Hacking is, in three words, owning your shit. Whether that’s a laptop, an old Kindle, your endocrine system, or a bicycle. It is seeing the things around you not as incomprehensible black boxes provided to you by people Who Know Better, but as things you can just play with. Even if you’re scared. Even if you know nothing. Even if you’ve never done it before. 70% of hacking, at least in my opinion, is simply getting over yourself.

And now I know how to solder PCB’s. I’ve done that. I know how to dismantle a mobile phone and replace its screen. I’ve done that. I know how to build a website, just about. I’m doing that. I know how to run a home server from a little raspberrypi. I’ve done that. Because of that, I’ve taken back control over my online life. Digital (self) Sovereignty, innit. It’s amazing how manageable it is. More amazing what my little Pi can do. I’ve got videos, music, passwords, documents, photos, and much more just happily humming away on it. I have this website humming away on it. And so much of that was just being brave enough to play with Docker and a CLI until things worked.

As it turns out, you can just try things. And you can live just a little bit more freely as a result of it. That’s hacking. This blog will be an attempt at that, too. Not producing a perfect LinkedIn page. It’s going to be as messy as my dockerfile. I’m not ashamed of my dockerfile, I’m proud of it, so why not this, too? I’m going to get there.

So, here’s to this blog making the world just that little bit richer. Self-hosted, mine, and a point of humanity in a world that inexplicably seeks to devalue the beauty of such little things.

Til the next time,
Alice