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Platform Engineer · Open Source Evangelist

Boring infrastructure, on purpose.

Thirty years of it, from mainframes to Kubernetes. I helped write three of the Linux Foundation's certification exams and continue to sit on the advisory council for one of them. 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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30 years · mainframes to Kubernetes Linux Foundation exam author Self-hosted, on purpose
John Coffey

John Coffey

Platform Engineer and Open Source Evangelist.

Latest writing

Notes from the machine room

Self-hosting, systems engineering and open source, written up after the fact by the person who had to fix it. All 133 articles, searchable.

  1. How I Accidentally Released Self-Hosted Thundermail

    I read Mozilla's Thundermail FAQ and realized I'd already built the self-hosted kind. Same Stalwart foundation, opposite ends of the problem, and a chart I made to calm down.

  2. inbuxa, Ten Days In

    Ten days ago I said why inbuxa exists. This is what it has done since: a migration tool you can download, the compliance features people hosting mail for others actually need, my…

  3. How Email Got Hard, and How inbuxa Makes It Easier

    Email is a simple idea buried under forty years of layers, each optional on paper and mandatory in practice. inbuxa can't make it simple again, but it can make it right by default.

  4. Six Days Without GitHub: What inbuxa Became Anyway

    On the day inbuxa launched, GitHub suspended my account and everything under it, without notice or a reason. Six days later the code lives on hardware I run, production mail runs…

  5. INBUXA Is Here: Why I Forked a Mail Server I Genuinely Admire

    Yesterday I gave you a name and nothing else. Today the curtain goes up. INBUXA is a mail and collaboration server, its console and its webmail, built as one suite with every…

Building

Tooling I wrote because I couldn't find it

All of it open source, all of it at Coffey Labs, where the full list lives.

Spotted a mistake, or want to argue?

Corrections and questions are welcome. Bugs in the projects are best as issues on the repository, where they stay findable for the next person.

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