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About bahua

Personal websites are very much a thing of the past, but here's the thing: Facebook, insta, and twitter aren't cutting it. I used to frequently update this site with my mundane happenings and everyday goings-on, but my adoption of social media cut almost a directly proportional amount of productivity out of my daily effort that I had previously allocated to website updates and development. I miss having a website. I miss trying new things and new technologies.

I wrote all the code that powers this website. It is, by far, the biggest driver of my capacity and enthusiasm for learning new concepts in technology. Its first form, in 2002, was 100% manual. I had to write HTML for every post, which weren't even thought of at the time as, "posts." I soon discovered an extremely unsecure layer for building pages called htsh. It just allowed the insertion of inline backticked shell commands. Though it was messy, I began to exercise some form of code discipline and reuse. In 2005 I started to learn perl, and within a couple years, I had converted the entire site to it. That's where I left it in 2008, when I first got on Facebook. Having done so basically halted any practical applications for any new technologies or concepts I learned, and now, in 2022, I'm tired of it, so I have rewritten the vast majority of the backend of this site, and incorported many concepts into it, like SSL, git, redis, authentication, access control, multimedia handling, and other ideas.

bahua is the online moniker of John Kelly. That's me. I'm a relatively normal 45-year old guy from Peoria, IL, who currently lives in Denver, CO. I'm married to a super lady, and we have two kids whose pictures are all over social media. I work for a large technology company that you've probably heard of, and you can probably figure out which one if you dig deep enough. Bully for you if you do, but please keep it to yourself. This website is not and never has been representative in any way of the means by which I put food on the table.

I really enjoy talking about politics, economics, technology, freedom, urban living, social issues, infrastructure, and many other things for which I have not been formally educated. If you can believe it, I have a passion for Linux, and so my career has largely focused on this. Like personal websites, general purpose computing is going away, which I find to be a massive shame, because Linux is wonderful, and my love for it, even on the desktop, keeps growing.

We want to travel more, and will when the kids get bigger.

This site is hosted on a VPS sold by Digital Ocean, maintained with git, neovim, alacritty, and linux, and is powered by apache, perl and redis. Email service is provided by mailgun. It's ugly, because I don't know how to make websites attractive.

Also, I'm on Mastodon

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@2002-2024, John Kelly