Professional Bit Flipper


Heya! I'm Seb, and my pronouns are they/them. I'm studying computer science at UWA, and this is my attempt at a personal website.

Interests

So, in case it wasn't obvious, I kinda enjoy messing around with computers. I am very much the stereotypical Linux user, and while I do enjoy making things "pretty" (I mean, I am a contributor to Catppuccin), I usually enjoy High Performance Computing (multithreading my beloved), messing with Asynchronous anything, Data Formatting / Collection / Pipelining and automating anything I can (I have 100% spent more time automating something than it would have taken to just do it manually). I also go crazy for anything with Linux (the more absurd the better). I am also currently (2025) an OCM (and a previous Vice-President) of the University Computer Club and take great joy in the amount of sensible projects the club gets up to (ask me about Coffinfish sometime!). Outside of that, I enjoy riding motorcycles and bicycles, and listening to music - to see what I am currently listening to, and the 20 songs I have played the most in recent history, click here (if you want to see how I did this, a write-up is in my blog). I use Emacs (because of course I do), and you can see my configuration files here.


Skills

Programming

I am proficient in using Python and C/C++, and I enjoyed Java when I last used it in uni. Sadly, I have written a bunch of code in JavaScript (including a lovely flavour called Google Apps Script), and so I am perfectly happy to write code in that. If I am forced to write a bash script, I will unironically use Amber instead, until it doesn't work lol. I have used SQL along with a little bit of Ruby with Rake files before, and found them fun.

I am perfectly comfortable using Numpy and Matplotlib in Python. I have done an amount of lower level network programming, as well as using MPICH and OpenMP for multi-threading and multi-node computing in C/C++, and enjoyed it immensely. I also quite like messing around with Pulumi for automating infrastucture creation, and I have had a heap of fun using Capistrano to automate deploying parts of this website (read about that on my blog).

Currently I work as a Software Engineer, where I write mostly C# and Cicode, and while I am still on the fence about C#, I have come around to liking Cicode enough (even if it doesn't have any syntax highlighting for any editors aside from Notepad++, and is slowwwwww, and that the sanest way to do most things is bitwise functions, but once you get over those pain points it is actually quite nice).

Linux

I am incredibly at ease at using the command line on Unix systems lol. I am not exaggerating when I say I am more comfortable and proficient at using (and fixing/trouble shooting) Linux systems compared to Windows systems. I take great joy in running the most cooked and cursed setups as my daily driver, and I am currently using Bedrock Linux with an EndeavourOS stratum and an Alpine Linux stratum

I am currently messing around with NixOS, in an effort to be able to completely rebuild the entire homelab declaratively. This is proving to be tremendous amounts of fun, however uni and work have meant this has been put on hold for the time being (although you can find my repository on my GitHub, and it *should* be linked below).

Web Development

As evidenced by you being able to read this, I can use HTML and CSS lol, and I have used both vanilla React by itself, as well the more normal way of using React before (parts of this website do actually use React! For example, here). This website was recently rebuilt with Astro instead of plain HTML/CSS with SSRI, so at this point I have used Astro a considerable amount, and have lightly used some other frameworks before, in the form of RedwoodJS, Deno, and NextJS. That said, I am definitely not a webdev by any means, and much prefer backend infrastructure if I need to do anything related to the web.


A list of my current (constantly) changing projects

Software

This is a list of my current projects, if you want to see write-ups of my completed projects, you can view them at my blog.

  • Server Side Rendered Includes (SSRI), a web templating framework I built inspired by Apache Server Side Includes. I have a lot to ramble about with it, so the entry here is short, but if you want to read more about it, the write up of it is here, and the GitHub repo is here.
  • Setting up my homelab to do everything with NixOS - repository here
  • Theming for KDE's Labplot, to add Catppuccin themes to it - this will hopefully be finished soontm. In true fashion, it all works, I am just running into the classic issue where finishing the last 10% of the documentation is harder than the rest of it was. If you want to try it out, my repository is here
  • The Vimium Catppuccin port which I maintain (which, to be honest, has needed very little maintenance so far).
Hardware

This is mostly up to date, however the pages linked to from here may not all be yet

  • My current daily driver is (sadly) not very exciting from a hardware perspective - it is an Asus Zenbook 13, which has me trapped in its OLED clutches. However, finding the hardware too sensible for my standards, my solution was to make the Operating System as cursed as possible, which is how I wound up running Bedrock Linux with an EndeavourOS stratum along with an Alpine Linux stratum (and I have also installed the Nix package manager too of course). This has a very Catppuccin themed i3 setup, although sadly overall it mostly "just workstm" too often for my liking.
  • An X270 thinkpad that is running FreeBSD, which I have been slowly upgrading with a new IPS FHD screen, new larger batteries, a 1TB Samsung M.2 SSD and 16GB of ram. Alas, after writing some incredibly fun scripts to avoid the forsaken BD-PROCHOT, I have pretty much stopped using it lol.
  • An x201 thinkpad that is running Alpine Linux with i3 (yes I know - I'm falling down the rabbit hole even more) - this has been upgraded as far as it can go (8 GB of ram let's go). This has also been phased out of regular use, mostly due to the screen being borderline painful to use.
  • An IBM x3200 M3 server (bonescallhome) which is no longer hosting this webpage - in fact, this is no longer even at my house! I found it too sensible, and so in true fashion for myself, I gave it to a friend.
  • An IBM x3550 M4 server (bonesrunhome) which is running a few VMs (including a debian VM which is dedicated to web-hosting)
  • A project that has now been put on the back burner: a Toshiba T3200 - this has a whopping 4MBs of ram, with a 40MB hard drive. Currently it isn't booting, and so my focus is to fix/replace the floppy disk drive (this is very much on the back burner on account of it now no longer turning on lol - unsure why, but it seems I may have let the magic smoke out- hopefully I'll fix it one day)
  • A ThinkPad 770z running Tiny Core Linux. This has had it's hard drive (an IBM Deskstar Deathstar that had started rattling) replaced with an SD card, and was an adventure in finding a Distro that supported such an old CPU. I setup some sort of window manager on it, iirc IceWM, and have promptly not used it since.
  • An IBM x3650 M2 (bonescrawlhome). This is not and will never be used - if you live in perth and want it please let me know lol.
  • Another (short-lived) acquisition is an IBM Power 750 Express.
  • bonesboundhome an IBM x3650 M4 that is running as my secondary server alongside bonesrunhome.
  • I also have an IBM bladecenter H, but I have no idea what I will ever use it for - this may be destined to die a horrible death soon, mostly due to the fact that UCC tries to murder me whenever it starts up.
  • The server rack that is currently heating my living room.