Writing
Articles
136 articles, newest first.
-
WGX Grew Up: It's ihasvpn Now, Rewritten From Scratch in Go
Eleven months ago WGX was an installer that wired a VPN together out of other people's parts. It has been rewritten from the ground up as a WireGuard server of its own — one Go binary, one container, a console worth…
-
Why I'm Moving jcoffey.dev, coffeylabs.org, and My Email Out of the United States
jcoffey.dev and coffeylabs.org are headed to Germany and my mail to the Netherlands. It costs more, it is slower by a few dozen milliseconds, and it means rebuilding sender reputation from scratch — here is the hassle…
-
ihasmail Was Written for One User
ihasmail started eleven months ago as a webmail for my own Stalwart server, and stayed private for ten of them. It is not competing with anyone — here is what it is, what it isn't, and why parity with other projects was…
-
Get Over Yourself and Support the Distro
Arch at home, Debian in the lab, RHEL and Ubuntu at work. I don't love IBM or Canonical either, and it changes nothing about what I run on a Monday morning — letting a corporate grudge pick your skill set isn't…
-
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 that actually landed needed nobody's…
-
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 has to stay yours.
-
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 chose. Plus swipe, hold and…
-
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 people who can keep them fresh.
-
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 verify it yourself.
-
Announcing ihasmail: a JMAP Webmail Built for Stalwart
Mail, calendar, contacts, files and a visual Sieve builder — one JMAP protocol, credentials never in the browser. AGPL-3.0, runs in a container, ships with a mock server so you can try it without touching real mail..
-
Announcing Cairn OBS: Kubernetes-Native Log Aggregation, AGPLv3, No Feature Gate
Cairn OBS is a Kubernetes-native log aggregation and observability platform — one query language over ClickHouse and Tantivy, dashboards, alerting, multi-tenant RBAC, AI-assisted queries. AGPLv3, whole thing, no paid…
-
Google Borg
Before Kubernetes, Google ran everything on Borg — quietly, for over a decade. Here's how Docker forced its hand, and how it reshaped AWS, Azure, and VMware.