The Curious Engineer

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Thib's Blog

ergaster.org

Ergaster is the personal website of Thibault Martin (Thib), a nonprofit strategist and open source program manager at the Matrix.org Foundation.

Linux / UnixDevOps / SRE / infrastructureDev tools / editors / IDEs

’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
57 from 18 May 2021 to 31 Aug 2026
Posting
monthly (17 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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2026 17

  1. TIL that Deleting files is better than hoarding them
  2. I realized that A cheap VPS is a good front
  3. TIL that Yubikeys are convenient for Linux login
  4. TIL that Minikube mounts volumes as root
  5. TIL that Pagefind does great client-side search
  6. I realized that Niri can have gorgeous animation
  7. TIL that Animated AVIFs make lightweight videos
  8. TIL that Kubernetes can give you a shell into a crashing container
  9. TIL that Helix and Typst are a match made in heaven
  10. TIL that Git can locally ignore files
  11. TIL that You can filter Helix pickers
  12. TIL that Sveltia is a good CMS for Astro
  13. Gear review: Garmin Forerunner 165
  14. I realized that You don't care
  15. I realized that I created too much friction to publish
  16. TIL that Proxmox can provision Kubernetes Persistent Volumes
  17. TIL that GNOME has launched a fellowship program

2025 12

  1. From VS Code to Helix
  2. Cloud tech makes sense on-prem too
  3. TIL that You can spot base64 encoded JSON, certificates, and private keys
  4. Aug 4, 2025 • self-hostingOver engineering my homelab so I don't pay cloud providersAfter years of self-hosting on a VPS in a datacenter, I’ve decided to move my services at home. But instead of just porting services, I’m using this as an opportunity to migrate to a more flexible and robust set up.
  5. Jul 28, 2025 • self-hostingLoading credentials from Bitwarden with direnvWhen working on my homelab, I regularly need to pass credentials to my tools. A naive approach is to just store the token in clear text, like for example in this opentofu snippet.
  6. Jul 9, 2025 • kubernetesKubernetes is not just for Black FridayI self-host services mostly for myself. My threat model is particular: the highest threats I face are my own incompetence and hardware failures. To mitigate the weight of my incompetence, I relied on podman containers to minimize the amo
  7. Jun 24, 2025 • self-hostingWhy is my Raspberry Pi 4 too slow as a server?I self-host services on a beefy server in a datacenter. Every night, Kopia performs a backup of my volumes and sends the result to a s3 bucket in Scaleway’s Parisian datacenter.
  8. May 7, 2025 • booksDeep Work reconciled me with personal growth booksI’m usually not a huge fan of personal growth books. As I pointed out in my Blinkist review, most books of this genre are 300 pages long when all the content would fit on 20. I read Deep Work by Cal Newport, with an open but skepti
  9. Apr 15, 2025 • mental-healthSocial media affect me more than I thoughtI’ve struggled with focus earlier this year. I felt pulled in all directions, overwhelmed by the world, and generally miserable. I decided to abstain from using social media for a week to see if anything would change.
  10. Feb 28, 2025 • gnomeProsthetics that don't betrayTech takes a central place in our lives. Banking, and administrative tasks are happening more and more online. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to get through life without a computer or a smartphone. They have become external organs necessary to l
  11. Feb 14, 2025 • musicYou can still own musicIn the 2000s I spent a lot of time with headphones on. Most of my pocket money went into CDs. I bought them, ripped them, loaded them into my music player and listened to them countless times.
  12. Feb 6, 2025 • conferencesFOSDEM for Work and for FunThis year again I have been going to FOSDEM for work, but also to record a couple interviews for my funding podcast and to hang out with some old friends.

2024 8

  1. Jul 31, 2024 • gnomeWhy are open source nonprofits so weird?In the open source industry, creating an American nonprofit to serve and fund a project is not uncommon. These structures can choose a fiscal status depending on their needs within a wide range defined by the IRS. The 501(c)(3) status is wi
  2. Jul 16, 2024 • obsidianObsidian for the part-time contractorI’m working as a contractor for the GNOME Foundation in addition to my regular job at the Matrix.org Foundation. Keeping track of tasks, decisions, and time spent on a project can become quite difficult when it’s not clearly time-boxed as “
  3. Jun 7, 2024 • gnomeAiming for a Big Bounce in the GNOME FoundationThe GNOME Foundation has been operating at a loss for several years and has a dysfunctional relationship with its community. As the Foundation started hitting its reserves, it needed to change course. A five-year Strategic Plan is a u
  4. Mar 20, 2024 • open-sourceOpen-source is a chainsawOpen-source is popular among software engineers and has been for decades. But far from a silver bullet that automatically makes everything better, open-source is a double-edged sword. It can make wonderful, sustainable projects or break the teams be
  5. Mar 6, 2024 • writingWelcoming feedback, where it belongsMy website is my digital public face. It is the first impression visitors get of me when browsing it. I’m careful about what I publish on my site since it impacts my public image. It is a one-way street, on purpose, but it doesn’t mean I’m not
  6. Feb 26, 2024 • writingWriting is hard, so I got helpI’m not a native English speaker. I make grammar mistakes, and I write convoluted sentences. This can muddy my message. I can nag colleagues and friends to proofread my prose, but I want to be mindful of their time. I decided to find a tool to help
  7. Jan 24, 2024 • matrixTracking what works, not peopleThe Matrix Foundation is in charge of various activities revolving around Matrix. One of the most important activities to make Matrix a mainstream protocol is lowering the barrier to entry for the general public. The Matrix.org website is a critica
  8. Jan 18, 2024 • self-hostingEscaping surveillance capitalism, at scaleOur relationship with computers and phones has changed. We used to rely on software installed locally on our computers, and are now shifting towards a model based on services and companion apps, sometimes with free tiers and subscr

2023 8

  1. Dec 30, 2023 • nonprofitA CRM for the Matrix FoundationThe Matrix.org Foundation is a non-profit. It carries out costly programs which are only supported by donations. The Foundation’s biggest donor by far has been Element since the Foundation’s early days. Individual donors have supported the Found
  2. Oct 18, 2023 • self-hostingShould you check SSH fingerprints?You just set up a new server, and you want to SSH into it to start configuring it. You open your terminal, use the ssh command to connect remotely into it and… you get greeted by a prompt telling you the authenticity of the host can’t be e
  3. Oct 5, 2023 • self-hostingMy server can burn, my services will runWhen I was a kid, our house got burgled three times. Our most valuable belongings were taken, our safe place put upside down, and our minds were scarred. This had a deep impact on my relationship with belongings: I want as little of t
  4. Aug 23, 2023 • note takingSyncing Notes with ObsidianIn a previous post I mentioned my quest for an interoperable successor to OneNote, and how I ended up settling with Obsidian. I often braindump in bed, before picking up the ideas and fleshing them out on a computer the next day. This means I need
  5. Aug 9, 2023 • self-hostingI don't want to host services (but I do)I don’t want to self-host, and even worse: I think most individuals shouldn’t host services for others. Yet, I am self-hosting services and I even teach people how to do it.
  6. Aug 1, 2023 • blinkistA book in 15 minutes - Blinkist reviewBlinkist is a paid service that gives you access to their summaries of popular books. Pick a book from their collection, and 15 to 30 minutes later you should know the key ideas behind the book.
  7. Jul 26, 2023 • note takingOneNote but InteroperableWhen I worked as a consultant, I loved OneNote on the Windows 7 machine I had to use. When moving to Windows 10 OneNote had become a version mess between the free and paid one… and then work allowed me to move to another operating system. Needless t
  8. Jul 13, 2023 • metaThe Website Existential CrisisAfter several months of work, I recently spearheaded the release of the new matrix.org website. The website refresh was long overdue. It started as a project to pay off tech debt, and I decided to take it as an opportunity to redesign it entirely.

2022 5

  1. Oct 28, 2022 • gnomeGNOME moves away from GIMPnetThe GNOME community has become a Matrix-first community some time ago, and we kept the bridges to our historical IRC network gimpnet as a convenience for people who were more comfortable using it. The GNOME community is going to move away from GIMPnet
  2. May 3, 2022 • gnomeScaling the Foundation to Contribute to GNOMEThis article follows one published by a former director, Allan Day, who detailed the evolution of the Board of Directors. The article you’re reading goes further on what I believe is needed to help us scale the Foundation to become an a
  3. Apr 25, 2022 • gnomeAdopting Matrix at the GNOME FoundationThe topic of our Instant Messaging platform of choice is quite old. In May 2021 I covered the history of IRC and Matrix in the GNOME Community.
  4. Apr 22, 2022 • gnomeFunding decentralised/local-first applications for GNOMEThe GNOME Foundation has not been giving as much news as we wish it has, but doesn’t mean nothing happened!
  5. Feb 22, 2022 • self-hostingEncrypted Backups on a Raspberrypi with a Sleepy DiskI self-host a few services. It’s easy to put services online, but self-hosting properly in the long run is difficult. A part of self-hosting properly is having backups and monitoring. In this article I’m going to show yo

2021 7

  1. Jun 22, 2021 • matrixOwning Your Matrix AccountWhen we deployed our Matrix instance for GNOME, we were really used to IRC. We did not think through all the ways people would use an account for, and left registrations too open. As a consequence, many people created an account on our instance because
  2. Jun 15, 2021 • gnomeProblems we faced on GNOME’s Matrix instanceThis post follows an introduction to Matrix with e-mails, where I explain that Matrix is a federated system.
  3. Jun 6, 2021 • gnomeOn the Sustainability of the GNOME FoundationFollowing a blog post by GNOME Foundation’s president Robert McQueen about The Next Steps for the GNOME Foundation, GNOME Designer and Foundation’s board member Allan Day opened a discussion for the board to issue recommendations to the
  4. Jun 2, 2021 • matrixMatrix for Instant MessagingThe Matrix protocol is full of concepts sometimes hard to grasp. In this post I’m going to try to cover how it’s used in the context of messaging, how close to e-mail it can feel, and how decentralisation is achieved in the open safely. For the sake of
  5. May 25, 2021 • gnomeRunning for the GNOME Foundation's Board of DirectorsLike many, I started my involvement in the GNOME community as an end-user. Eventually, I wanted to give back to this project I loved. I wanted to see both the project and the community strive. We already had and still have many
  6. May 22, 2021 • gnomeOn the “Libera Chat” SpamFirst, of course, we know that despite what the spam indicated the spam did not actually come from Libera Chat teams. It comes from imbeciles who obviously wanted to give Libera Chat a bad image by flooding all sorts of disgusting messages.
  7. May 18, 2021 • gnomeIRC, Matrix, and thanks for all the kicksI’ve come to talk with you about instant messaging platforms and peaceful coexistence. This is a pretty heated issue, so I count on everyone to keep the conversation constructive so we can shape our future platform together in a positive w