Welcome

Well... Here we are.

Published on 2023-10-28

Welcome to my new domain ste5e.site. In case you are new here, this is the domain belonging to me, Steven Leibrock, programmer-for-hire and all around tech goofball.

I am writing this because it's been a pretty long time since I wrote an "introductory" post of some sort. I might pin this to the front page in some capacity as a "hey, welcome, here's what I'm about" kind of guy. By doing this, you can decide immediately whether you stick around (by using RSS or bookmarking, or whatever floats your boat).

Anyways, let's begin.

About Me

My name is Steven, and I have been a programmer for something like 18+ years now. I got my start by installing Ubuntu on a computer I probably should not have, and now I write code that runs in server computers in random parts of the world. I am a practicer of Computer Science, the art of understanding what a computer does under the hood and how to solve real-world problems with it. I use computers every day, and have a wide array of experience with them, inside and out.

I live with my partner in Long Island, New York, and we raise a dog together.

My partner and I, May 2023

Our goofball dog

Programming wise, I am experienced the most with Python, and it is what pays the bills. I love using and trying out new languages where possible, and my most-notably used ones would be as follows (most to least order):

Racket, a fun Scheme/Lisp language
Haskell, the wizardry language
Rust, not quite C, not quite Haskell
Zig, a not-quite Rust language
Janet, a not-quite Lisp language

In my spare time for fun, I enjoy video games. Who doesn't? They're fun. It's also my ambition to one day become a self-published game developer to support a small family. We'll get there one day. The game I spend objectively the most with is Oldschool RuneScape, and I've been playing that for years.

My Oldschool RuneScape character. I have been playing this account on and off for several years now, with over 245 days of in-game time accumulated.

My other hobby includes the hit card game Yu-Gi-Oh!, which I only really picked up during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ever since then, I've been playing it less digitally and more in paper with friends. I have a few constructed decks, and have watched the anime series.

My prized collection of Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V manga exclusive cards, next to figures of Red Eyes Black Dragon and a miniature Blue Eyes White Dragon.

Past that, I am focused on working towards being the best possible version of myself by applying a pragmatic principle of always looking for the best and most practical option in any given situation. Should you like reading about programming, computers, or even video games, feel free to stick around, I'll try my best to write as often as possible.

I welcome shared opinions on any article I write, and you can reach me over email or Mastodon.

How We Got Here

This is technically a new domain, and if you click that post, it goes into what happened with the last domain and how we ended up here.

This is my personal blog, where I write about anything that tickles my fancy. I started it a few years ago, maybe back around 2019 when I first purchased the domain, and started doing self-hosted blogging, where I use a static site generator to generate a website, push it to a host, and push it to social media / the webz all my own.

To achieve this goal of hosting a website, I did the following steps:

purchased a web domain from Namecheap
set up a website project in Cloudflare's dashboard system
changed their DNS servers to point to my Cloudflare DNS servers
created a GitLab repository for my website
used Zola to create my website
used Git to push my website to my GitLab repository
created a Cloudflare Pages project in Cloudflare to pull from my GitLab repository
modified my site's DNS settings in Cloudflare to then point to the Cloudflare Pages domain
continue to update my blog with GNU Emacs

One might ask, "Why not use GitLab Pages instead of Cloudflare Pages?", and my answer is: I don't think GitLab is suitable for proper website hosting. While I think GitLab is great for hosting homepage projects or other such things, I think Cloudflare has better tools for dealing with hosting, like caching, traffic handling, DoS protection, DNS rules, and more importantly I get their analytics tools to use as well. That's right, I can see where all of you are from now.

The site is generated with Zola, as mentioned, and I used to try and create my own static sites with Racket, but I don't do that as much anymore since it eats up a lot of time via yak shaving constantly.

Freelance Services

Much like the famous Freelance Detectives Sam and Max, I am also a freelance programmer. Should you need services of mostly any kind, I can be of help. If you need assistance with any of the following list of services:

building computers, or disassembling / doing data recovery
building out websites much like this for personal or commercial use
building out business logic applications in open-source languages
setting up DevOps pipelines for your commercial needs
writing blog posts for your technology product

Then I am available for hire! Please drop me an email at contact[at]ste5e.site and we can talk more there. Depending on your needs, I could offer to work pro-bono, but there is no guarantees of that, so please keep that in mind and let's not waste each others' time.

Hardware

I have a wide collection of hardware, and I'll mention them here so you know exactly what I work with and sometimes write about.

My main Desktop daily driver PC, a Ryzen 5 7600X 6-Core CPU workstation that runs EndeavourOS Linux
My remote-work oriented Dell Precision 5550 Intel i9 10k series with a 1TB NVMe and Nvidia GPU running EndeavourOS Linux
My Lenovo Thinkpad T440 with a 4c/8t i7 CPU running Guix OS
A really old Steam Machine made by Alienware, currently has openSUSE Linux
A Steam Deck with custom 256GB SSD replacement
An iPad Pro 2017 model I purchased to only really to draw with. It's still kicking.
A Zune HD

I use Linux full-time as my daily driver, and my only real interaction with it is with a Windows PC I use mostly because of my partner. I will probably only talk about Linux here.

Summary

That's it about me, for the most part. I like video games, Yu-Gi-Oh!, metal music and fiddling around with both code and Linux. You can catch me on Mastodon talking about whatever, and on here also blogging about whatever. I will continue to update this with whatever relevant information I feel is important for me to create a connection with you, a visitor and hopeful future reader.

Feel free to follow my main RSS feed for updates, as I believe RSS is pretty future-proof and allows us to connect better with others. Past that, I hope to see you around again sometime!