About Me ________________________________________________________________________________ I am a early-30s professional hardware and software enthusiast. This enthusiasm primarily extends to embarking on personal projects and sharing the experiences generated by those projects with the larger community through proper implementation and detailed documentation. Linux ________________________________________________________________________________ My initial foray into Linux was in 2006 with a live CD of Ubuntu 6.06 I got from a magazine at the library. Windows Millenium Edition was simply too much for my lowly Pentium 4 and 512MB of RAM, and the immense OS size was doing no favors for my 32GB IDE hard drive. I had to get out. It was a wild time. I explored a lot of the differences between Windows and UNIX at the time, attempting to better understand what exactly I had uncovered. I wrote a few tutorials on how to properly setup FTP and how to build a media server - my first was a music jukebox I setup off a garbage Dell laptop with a busted backlight I got for free from a family member. Streaming before streaming. Spotify would launch two years later. It was fun, different, and exciting. My transition looked like... Ubuntu (2006) Windows Vista (2007) Mint (2008) Windows 7 (2009) Windows 8 (2012) Arch (2013) OSX (2014) Arch (2018) LFS (early 2019) Arch (mid 2019) KISS (late 2019) Beyond (2022++) As you can see, I left Linux in 2009. This was mainly due to my newfound fascination with computer hardware and gaming - gaming on Linux was in a sad state in 2009, and continued to be so for several years after. But alas, the prodigal son has returned. And with my Nintendo Switch in hand, I don't think I will ever really return to PC gaming with the same vim and vigor as before. Tech ________________________________________________________________________________ I have been a tech enthusiast since around early 2009 when I built my first computer. The whole thing started because I wanted to play Civilization 4 and the PC I had at the time was woefully inadequate for the task. LGA 775 still holds a special place in my heart. I maintained multiple high-score records on overclock.net, and built a few PCs of varying form-factors and price levels. My time in the PC enthusiast community was spent mainly educating people on the structure of a motherboard and CPU, how those pieces connected to each other, and how their relationship could be exploited for improving performance. I transitioned away from the community around 2014 to focus more on my education. Education ________________________________________________________________________________ I enrolled at Michigan State University in 2012, initially pursuing a degree in Advanced Mathematics with additional majors in Physics and Astrophysics. I quickly dropped Astrophysics in my third semester - it was simply too much work for very little payoff. I switched to a dual-degree in Advanced Mathematics and Physics my sophomore year, and dropped Physics the following semester - it was unfulfilling and I didn't appreciate the teaching practices of MSUs Physics faculty. My junior year I dropped Advanced Mathematics after brutally failing the hardest undergraduate course in mathematics MSU offered: Number Theory. To this day, the entire field still baffles me. That class taught me one thing: I am terrible at maths. So instead I picked up two philosophy classes. Changed my life! Considering I had what was mostly a first-year PhD student education in Mathematics and most of the undergraduate program finished off, I tacked a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics onto my BA in Philosophy. My mathematics experience extends across most of the major fields - I've done complex analysis (a baby-course on the subject), knot theory (my capstone course, a topological approach), partial differential equations (semi-theoretical), algebra (extending through Galois Theory, Sylow p-Subgroups, etc). It was brutal and not-fun. My philosophy experience was informed mostly by personal interests - I was a far more strict positivist for late-high school and most of college (the Tractatus was my favorite book, if that gives you some indication). I studied history (Aristotle's de Anima, Leibniz+Newton+Spinza, Kant). Additionally, some philosophy of mind (more-or-less an overview of the field's history and current topics), and some metaphysics (again, a history of the field and current topics). I didn't take a proper epistemic course (in the tradition of epistemology). Most of my exposure to epistemology filtered in through what I learned of 20th century philosophy. I was primarily educated on current topics in the field through Critical Theory. More specifically, feminism and feminist epistemologies. Far more fulfilling than the stuffy empiricism I scoffed at back then, and still do today. However, my primary focus was language and logic. I took an advanced course on classical logic (we worked through all of Plummer, Barwise, and Etchemendy's Language, Proof, and Logic), and a topics course on non-classical logics (using Priest's introductory text). It was in these courses where I honed my disdain for the classical logician and the law of excluded middle. I took several seminars and topics courses on philosophy of language - topics spanned everything from ambiguity and relevance, intentionality, cooperative communication, linguistic meaning, the reality of language, and so on. A veritable feast, if you will. I attempted to develop a theory of how precisely communication should be understood - too large a project for a fledging undergrad with no funding. But it was interesting and exciting to flesh-out a theory I had been developing in the back of my mind since high school, which was nice. In @/papers you will be able to find a large number of the papers I worked on for a variety of courses. Some of them are fine, most of them are bad. Good luck and have fun. I wrote my undergraduate philosophy thesis on unrestricted quantification. As such, I hold a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics, and another in Philosophy. Work ________________________________________________________________________________ My first 'real job' (one I held for longer than three months), was as a tutor for the Mathematics Learning Center at Michigan State. This essentially spelled disaster for me - I spent more time teaching than I did learning, and my grades suffered for it. But I loved it! I tutored topics ranging from introductory algebra/trigonometry/precalculus, up through multivariable calculus and differential equations. I was a teaching assistant for algebra, precalculus, calculus I & II, the latter for which I won an Excellence in Teaching Award. I supervised three of MSUs six learning centers, one of which was housed in the Engineering dorm - it had the highest amount of foot traffic of all the centers besides the main one that year. Due to poor academic performance (and overwhelmingly terrible financial obligations and severe mental health issues), I was not accepted to any of the philosophy PhD programs I had applied for. I attempted to further pursue education - substitute teaching, adjuncting, tutoring centers - and none of it panned out for me. I conceded my failures, and took a job at Starbucks. After a year, I recommenced the job search, and six months later got a job at major bank. It's fine, but I yearn for something more productive, hands-on, and educational. COVID sent us all to work from home. I was immediately smitten by the notion. About a year later they informed us that we'd all be coming back to the office. No thank you! So I set out applying for fully remote positions. I'd been messing about quite a bit with Linux at this point (I had picked up KISS the same time I had started at the bank), and I'd built up quite the toolset of handy dandy skills (which serve me well to this day, and I'm quite grateful for the opportunities Dylan Araps gave me with his little gift to the world), so I thought back to Canonical. They've always been remote-first. Applied on a whim and Steve Barriault took a chance on me (even after the CEO said "eh"). I'm also thankful for that chance. At the time of writing, I've been at Canonical for just north of four and a half years as a Field Engineer on the Devices team. Plans for more. Current ________________________________________________________________________________ Currently, I have a few projects I am working on. In no particular order: * The content in @/papers needs some revision so I can be more proud. * Learning C as a beginner - mostly to better support other work. * Benevolent Dictator For Now of $/dilyn-corner/KISS-kde * Former BDFL of KISS Linux, formerly helping $/kiss-community Currently, I work at Canonical. What all does this mean? It means that I spend a lot of time working on Ubuntu products and with Ubuntu customers. My experience is primarily focused on Ubuntu Core and our embedded space. You can find me representing the org at the RISC-V US summit or at a variety of trade shows sporting the orange polo. You can find a lot of my work under the $/canonical banner, mostly focusing on hardware enablement work via $/canonical/iot-field-kernel-snap and $/canonical/iot-field-gadget-snap I spend a lot of time working on documentation, hiding in the background of the community-focused CODA project. I'm an honorary TA, or so I've been told. My NAS project has successfully kicked off thanks to a delicious bonus check at the start of last year; this website is actually being hosted on it. I'm a pedant and a perfectionist at heart, and as such I found the existing immich and jellyfin snaps unsatisfying. As such, I now maintain my own variants of a whole stack, you can find them in the Global snap store with a dilyn- prefix. I also maintain the caddy snap :) I have future plans of learning dart and working with flutter to produce a sort of OOBE for Ubuntu Core NAS devices... A bit tricky, and I'm so far very slow. One day! You can find that work at $/dilyn-corner/core-nas I'm returning to my 2019-era roots with KISS this year. My focus will be on the klam branch of $/dilyn-corner/kiss-me - this branch is primarily focused on getting to a minimum viable environment for work, leveraging incus to do any complex lifting. I want to return to the minimal lifestyle and eschew glibc, and that means I cannot run snaps (as they require systemd, which basically forces glibc). The up-shot is I may be able to get away with this in the environments incus enables me to run. The future ________________________________________________________________________________ TBD. ________________________________________________________________________________ Dilyn Corner (C) 2020-2026