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John Coffey

Boring infrastructure, on purpose.

Thirty years of it, from mainframes to Kubernetes, now Manager Platform Engineering – Linux & Containers. I helped write two of the Linux Foundation's certification exams and sit on the advisory council for a third. Mail servers that stay up, zero trust that isn't theatre, and tooling I wrote because I couldn't find it.

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John Coffey

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  1. OpenPGP and Email: The Hype, the Truth, and the Falsehoods

    Encrypted email never became a mainstream habit, and the usual explanation — bad tooling — is wrong. The problems are structural, better UX doesn't fix them, and the privacy win…

  2. AI Is Not the Solution. It's the Tool.

    The argument against AI is the argument I heard against Google in 1998, with the nouns swapped. It was a bet against literacy then, and it lost. The tool is neutral; the judgment…

  3. ihasmail Gained Nine Languages

    Translations are the easiest thing in software to ship dishonestly. ihasmail gained nine, all of them machine-made and unreviewed — and the app says so, in the language you just…

  4. LINUXexpert.org Is Retiring, and Everything Is Moving Home

    After years of how-tos and study guides, LINUXexpert.org is winding down. The writing moves here to jcoffey.dev, the projects move to coffeylabs.org, and the tutorials go to the…

  5. ihasmail Goes Immutable: No Volume, No Database, Nothing Left Behind

    Most "stateless" software still hides a config directory somewhere. ihasmail's IMMUTABLE=1 mode runs read-only with no volume at all — here's the trade-off, and two commands to…

Building All projects →

  • ihasmail

    Immutable webmail for Stalwart

    A Gmail-class mail, calendar, contacts and files client that speaks only JMAP — no IMAP, no SMTP, no database, and with IMMUTABLE=1 no writable filesystem either. The container has nothing to persist, so there is nothing on the client side to back up.

  • Cairn OBS

    Kubernetes-native log aggregation

    Open-core observability built to match Splunk on capability and beat it on cost-per-GB, with multi-tenant RBAC that is honest about what it isolates. AGPLv3 throughout, enterprise directory included.