My name is Sean Macdonald. I’m sometimes known as @code_monk. Some people call me the Cloud Whisperer, but nobody has called me the Gangster of Love or Maurice. I am a Developer / Architect / Engineer living in Toronto, Canada. I enjoy hacking on Go, Bash, Rust, Typescript, Systemd, Docker, Kubernetes, and lots of other tech. I am especially passionate about infrastructure and ops.

I have benefited greatly from the open-source community over my 20+ year long career in tech. Open Source is a philosophy, and as good a guide to a rewarding life as any dogma. It is an example of how a community can be at once nurturing and meritocratic. Libertarian and at the same time egalitarian. It gives me hope. As such, I aim to make my OSS contributions accessible, well-designed, and well-documented (ie: useful).

About this blog

This blog is mainly about putting down ideas that cannot easily fit into READMEs, code comments, or commit messages. I have worked in a diverse set of roles across the tech domain, and endevour to offer a broad and informed perspective on devOps, Infrastructure Engineering, Application Architecture, and other demented fruits of Techno Balogna. Very occasionally, I write about non-technical subjects.

This site is a heavily-modified version of yinyang, the beautiful Hugo site by the enormously talented joway. Some elements were inspired by the Cupper theme and it’s excellent collection of shortcodes. I’ll put it up on Hugo Themes when I’ve had a chance to clean it up. It’s plain old CSS and plain old javascript, or rather plain new javascript, in that I’m using modern features of ES6 and not bothering to polyfill (sorry, users). Deployment is handled by a simple bash script that rsyncs up to an EC2 instance. There is really no need to get fancier than that.

Please, enjoy.

_s.