Bonan Tagon

I usually really struggle with writing introduction (for philosophical reasons), but I'll try and copy a few ideas from previous introductions I've read - these seem to go over the folowing topics (maybe this can help people in the future struggeling with the same issue as I am while writing this): how one found nixers, who one is "in real life", ones interests (possibly beyond *nix/cs/etc.), ones interests within *nix (software choices, ideoms, etc.), ones projects and contact methods/networks. Alternativly one can just say hi, but I find this unsatisfying. So, let me start by beginning:

# On finding nixers
I am quite sure I have stumbeld by nixers.org a few times over the years, but is was only recently when I have started engaging more activly (in a passive way) with suckless' & the groups aligned with their cause (cat-v, division by zero, bitreich, etc.) that I have come to acctually "notice" nixers. Specifically z3bra's site helped me realize my interest in the commuity, which from lurking the forum for the last few day's has made a very pleasent while also compitent appearance.

# Who' writing this nonsense
My actuall first name is "Philip" (with two p's, one on both sides), but I have used multiple pseudonyms over time: "avika", "survi", "zgebiit" and mutations and combinations of these. Occasionally I also use "phik" or "phikal", if I want it to resemble my real name ("k[al]", are the first few letters of my surname). So if you find these names on some old stupid comments, yeah, that was probably me.

I have just started studying comupter science (Informatik) in Germany, and have turned 19 exactly 2 months ago (petite birthday ^^) and have been using unix-like operating systems for about 5 years. Very different than most others here, I'm afraid, but I'm sure we will get along.

As I've already implied I live in Germany (Bavaria), hence speek German, but I was born in England so my English is fairly good too, but from time to time a bit rusty. Other than that I also am fairly good in Serbo-Croatian, due to my heritage, and I have been trying to learn Esperanto for a while no, but sadly with nowhere near the passion I actually would need. I have no personal national identity. I like to archive stuff.

# Interests beyond *nix/CS
Since I value general education [Allgemeinbildung], my interests (and time I devote to them) are all over the place. My parents are on the one side a Physicist/Programmer (Father) and on the other side Artist/Educator (Mother), and I find myself somewhere inbetween. Hence I like engaging and learning about anything from Arts, Design, Music, Psychology and History to CS, "hard" Science/Math, Economics and (critical) Philosophy (although I have to admit that I tend more towards "continental" philosopy, than analytical). Especially the intersections between different subjects (History and CS, for example) I find very interesting. As a result, I know a lot of stuff about a lot of things, but nowhere would I concider myself an expert. The exception would be CS, with which I have had a bit more (practical) experiance than the others:

# Interests within *nix/CS
Let me start with a backstory, skip this part if you're not interested, but why the hell have you read this far if you're not interested???:

My first memory of using a computer was one running Windows 98, where I somehow managed to pull the task bar from the bottom of the screen to the left side. My father was confused (he was more of a unix guy), and told me to put it back. I was about 3 years old, couldn't properly speak but that's where my comupter careere started.

It took me a while to go beyond using Email, browsing the early 20's web and playing flash games and drawing stuff in paint. This lasted about 8-9 years.

When I started to want to learn programming, we still only had one windows machine in our house, and I didn't have the admin password, which I needed to install compilers, editors, interpretors, etc. Eventually, I decided that I would have to gain proper access over the computer, and I dual-booted Linux (Ubuntu) on the device. I could have deleted everything. Luckely I managed to install it and keep it a secret from my father (who was at that time the system admin in the house) for about 6 months. During this time, I had tought myself how to use a shell, a few scripting lanuages, some web development networking basics and multiple ways to break xorg.

Eventually my father found out I was dual booting, but luckely I got his blessing, and eventually even got my own comupter. Here starts distro hopping: Fedora, Arch, Crux, FreeBSD, Mint, multiple Ubuntu derivative, OpenSuSE, Elementary. Many were good, I even liked some of them, but they either were too much of a burden to maintain or just broke over time. I finally setteled for three options: Debian, Void and OpenBSD - currently I'm writing this post on a Thinkpad X41 with Void running 2bwm and Seamonkey as a browser (+multiple security oriented plugins). I blame /g/ for these preferences.

As it might not suprise that many people, I found the greatest interest in *nix like software: modular, simple/minimal, open, clean and hackable. Other than that, I also value standards (as in comparison to special, secret protocols for each new programm - and yes, I'm thinking of the situation in IM) and distributed/decentralized structures, relying more on the authority of cryptograpy than centralized databases.

Programming Languages I use: Lisp, Python, C, Go, Java, awk, shell, for the most part, while I also engaged with others. But since I don't see myself as an engineer, I don't bother too much with specifics and flamewars. Editorwise, I maily alternate between Emacs and Vim.

# Projects
I could divide this into two sections:
1. "Projects I have completed to some degree, but wish to expand on, but don't have time, even though I do have enough time, but I'm acctually just too lazy":
- ReGeX: A Regular Expression game for Android: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.phikal.regex/ (even though hate Java)
- llist: A "kind" of simple Hackernews/Lobse.rs clone: https://github.com/phikal/llist (I used to have this running on my site, but since I radically minimalized it, It's not there anymore. I wrote is since I never got knew how to get invited to lobste.rs, so I made my own community of one person)
- sc: A RPN shell calculator (I know boring), with a custom lisp interpreter built in to define more complex operations: https://github.com/phikal/sc (The last part has been WIP for quite a while now, since I had to figure out how to write an interpretor by myself)
- 4jhan: A image-board engine without any front-end: https://github.com/phikal/4jhan-server (I plan to complety rewrite this into Go, add backend-federation support over IRC and make the API comply more with 4chan/vichan's)

etc. see my GitHub (and add me <3)

2. "Projects I have thought about for a while, but wish I had started them, but don't have time, even though I do have enough time, but I'm acctually just too lazy":

The main one here is a cgit clone with support for more social features like issue and patches. The interesting thing would be that it would require no accounts, but instead use (for example) Email and GPG as a verification method - this would mean that it could be easily federalisied. But I'm not even sure if I want to do this in the first place, since web dev. isn't known to be the nicest thing to work with.

# Contact
Homepage: https://phi.k.vu/ (check out my old 404 page: https://phi.k.vu/404.html) - I hope this is good example for my interest in minimalism.

Everything you need to contact me can be found there. Please don't spam me though, or send me ad's. Absolutly hate that.
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I hope that that was a well rounded enough introduction, and alreay applogize in case it was too long. I tend to either write nothig, or far too much. Ask me *if* there are any more questions left.