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.
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 136 articles, searchable.
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Software You Rent vs. Software You Own
Commercial software was never really yours, and the last pretense of ownership is going away. Broadcom's VMware is the loudest example, not the only one. What renting costs, what…
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Just a Hobby: Thirty-Five Years of Linux and the Fortune Nobody Collected
Thirty-five years ago this week Linus Torvalds shipped Linux 0.02 and called it a hobby. Fourteen years later he gave away Git too. A tour of the world we'd be living in if he had…
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Why Coffey Labs Is an LLC Now
On October 5 Coffey Labs became Coffey Labs LLC, an Arizona company that owns the projects it maintains. Why I did it, why it had to be now, and what it does and doesn't change…
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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.
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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…
Building
Tooling I wrote because I couldn't find it
All of it open source, all of it at Coffey Labs (opens in a new tab), 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.