About me

Disclaimer: I'm not a robot.

Hello dear you, I'm happy you have landed on this page, it reveals you are curious enough about people to want to know them better. I like you already 😃 ! This is especially true if you are a human being, I mean I do appreciate any visit of my website, even from indexing robots 👾 that save me from the manual labor of registering my website in popular search engines.

Let me present myself, first! - after a first third cup of coffee ☕ - I'm Morgan alias SansGuidon online. I'm Belgian, some kind of Brusseleir 🇧🇪, living in Anderlecht, the city of the Lambic and Gueuze beers 🍻 and also ⚽️ even if it's out of my sight.

I'm a programming geek also owner of Zoemp (say [Zump]) with my partner and author of ✨ Bombo Podcast 🎙️ which I'm also funding 😜.

👨‍👩‍👦 I'm a proud dad 🍼, also espresso junkie ☕️, indie hacker 👨🏻‍💻, simplicity seeker 👣. Occasionally trying to level up my espresso game, craft my tech 💻️ or drawing skills 💬, reduce information overload 🤯, gain online privacy 🫥, and support the projects I like while staying sane and optimistic 🌞. I love retro terminals and old looking games, dark humor and calm/low technology.
I've plenty of imagination, an infinite appetite for problem solving and knowledge, information sharing and I enjoy several passions (and obsessions).

🚀 Interests

I have interests for board games, reading, writing, drawing, art, music (explore my Last.fm or Rate Your Music profiles) -- especially (80s) thrash metal 🤘🏻🎸 like Death Angel -- blogging, Lego, podcasts, board games, learning, parenting, gastronomy, craft beer & specialty coffee, retro art, chess game, climbing, walking, nature, humanism, psychology, philosophy, scripting/hacking/automation, game development, teaching, entrepreneurship/freelancing, healthy food, minimalism, data privacy.

If you are interested in the code I share, follow my blog and visit my Gitea profile (self-hosted instance).

📝 Blogging

I created this blog as I wanted to share my thoughts on different topics without being limited to the ones above. This is not my first blog, and I've struggled a lot with perfectionism and analysis paralysis before starting this one, especially as I was tempted to reinvent the wheel and create my own tools for blogging. Fortunately, I was convinced by a few former colleagues (hello, D. 😅) at Collibra and other folks to just take action and keep things simple, so here I am, blogging through WordPress (self-hosted with Contabo) which sometimes I hate and often I love (it's just too easy to edit a page or a post in the comfort of my bed without having to run any CI pipeline).

Most of my articles on this blog are tutorials, rants, guides, tips and tricks.

• There are also shorter articles.
• In addition to this blog your will find links which I collect and share while browsing the internet.
• There are also some ideas and notes.

💼 Work

For a living I do help keeping cloud costs minimal and human work friction-less, by automating tasks and improving misc things at will like improve performance and eliminate waste. Everything is interconnected and contributions to make things greener are always inspiring me to do good for our planet. How I make this more tangible is via technical work (code, automation), and being more human (teamwork, education) with the aim of leaving things better than I've found them.

• From 2010 to 2022, I was working as employee through different roles (from Dev to DevOps) for various employers in diverse industries (road assistance, banks, data governance, social network...).
• In 2022, I've shifted from employment to freelancing.
• In 2023, I've joined Ibanity where we abstract bank APIs. At this time I'm no longer looking for new opportunities.

You can learn more about my career via my CV (pdf) (and LinkedIn) and if you are a recruiter, you should first read about what I look for and optionally read my rant on what bugs me with tech recruiters.

🤪 Things I believe

• Murphy's Law
• (archived) Socrates Triple Filter Test

• Git is crap too complex/low-level and error-prone. It is overkill for solving some simple problems and its glossary lacks consistency and its UX is crap as it was likely designed to be used behind another abstraction which we are still lacking, well there are still things like lazygit and jujutsu (jj). I probably need to elaborate a blog post about it like for everything listed in my Ideas page. Be patient.
• GitHub is a nice web tool to index leaked secrets and find "i hate git" commits and alternative to crap tools.
• Advice does not work (archive). I guess then I should stop here. But I won't because human beings are bad at judgment.
• CloudFlare is a modern tool to kill all benefits of Internet decentralization. Outages, anti-spam techniques propagated by CF & co are harming for the accessibility of Internet. It's a single point of failure. See also part of my critique through Dark patterns collection and Ideas.
• Contabo VPS and Object Storage are crap. Why did I pick them ? For it was cheap. And now I get why and you should know 🫠.
• Helm templating is crap. Instead check Werf, CUE, Timoni, Glasskube.
• JavaScript everywhere is still crap in 2024 (archive) and makes the web bloated (archive), i.e obese (archive). See 🌱 Web minimalism.
• Software in general is bloated and discriminates users with slow devices (archive.today) (a. See also 🌱 Web minimalism.
• NodeJS and Ruby/Rails are memory hogs. Lot of time I see badly optimized apps in web app stores it's using one of those stacks.
• Dealing with computers is not magic. Magic is problematic.
• Keep things simple. But do we want simplicity ? (archive).
• CI/CD in their current form (GitHub, GitLab, ...) based on YAML, are bad. I prefer something like Dagger.
• Microsoft is evil and builds crappy and insecure products. They make it easy to spy an any government and infiltrate systems.
• 📱Touchscreens and ever updating UI make us stupid, even US Navy ditches them.
• 🏦 Capitalism is crap and a source of inequalities.
• 💣️ Automation of manual labor is the right thing to do but what we pretend to be "AI" now is crap and is harming our planet, our education and our lives.
• 🤦 Idiocracy is eating democracy for dinner and our reality resembles the movie too well.
• 💂 Privacy is a foundation.
• Access to Health, Culture and Education should be granted for all and it can be so simple but it's not a political priority.
• Delegation is a double edged sword (more free time but accept disillusions, incompetence, drama...).
• 📨 Better shipped incomplete than WIP forever.
• Avoid social media and centralized platforms in general.
  Businesses, products, platforms etc. are fragile, so is your data. Don't be too dependent on any platform or social media for publishing or hosting your content / business, things don't last. You do not want your content and communities to vanish without notice. If you really can't avoid them, one option is to mirror your work to those platforms, but have your original copies elsewhere.
  See also my 🥷 Privacy tips.
• Developers reach out way too soon for help when a CI/CD issue occurs. Please read your pipeline logs and test locally !
• You fear data loss ? Double check you follow the 3-2-1-1-0 Golden Backup Rule (archive) and improve your backup strategy. And don't use Contabo storage as a backup. Hell no.
• Working on automating something even if you don't use it everyday is worth it, at least probably worth automating and sharing the result/recipe for it will probably help someone else in the world or allow someone to develop something better on top of your experience.
• 🐢 Do not act in a hurry if possible. Patience is key.
• More of my views via Principles and Oh Shit.

💭 Quotes

• 🪨 Quality is always right.
• 🧐 Trust but verify.
• 🪠 If you are Luke, use the force. If you have no Luck, use the --force.
• 🦸 Things won't happen by themselves. (about going in motion / bringing energy).
• 🥔 If it were potatoes, would you eat them ? About how you care of things and quality.
• 🚢 A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for. i.e "don't waste your talent". (about entrepreneurship and avoiding status quo).
• 🫀Breathe your heart (orig: Respire ton coeur). Credits to Aaron, my little one ❤️.
• The two most important days of your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why. ~ Mark Twain Via The Equalizer | Netflix.
• 🚴 Don't be after the money - Be after the freedom that comes with having the money. Two different goals.
• 🎢 It’s a truism that people don’t think about infrastructure until it breaks, but they tend not to think about the fixing of it, either. Adactio: Links—The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat (archive).
• 🏗️ Any working system can become invisible to the point where the system loses value because it’s working - Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease (archive) - via Adactio.
• 💂 "I do not intend to run around like a wet hen! There'll be plenty of time, sir !" Duke of Wellington in Waterloo: the movie (1970) (archive).
• ➕ More quotes in my Git repository.
• 🌧️ We are not be going to melt (we shall not fear rain). Translation: On n'est pas être en sucre (ne pas craindre la pluie). Yeah because it rains often in Belgium it's better to be resilient and not let that ruin your plans.
• 👨🏼‍🔧 Be ready, neglected problems won't remain ignored or small for long. They are fires and crisis waiting to happen.

🔗 Follow me

1. 💌 Subscribe through my RSS feeds. If you prefer newsletters, I don't have but you can convert RSS to email using a free service like Blogtrottr.
2. 👀 Check my /now and /ideas pages to know what's up with me anytime.
3. ❌ Social: I'm unfortunately not active in GitHub, StackOverflow, X (ex-Twitter), Mastodon, Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, Facebook, LinkedIn, Discord, Telegram, Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok, Skype, WeChat. Everything important is on this internet home/blog, this is fine and I enjoy this independence away from proprietary platforms, censorship and tracking. Also I prefer not to build my castle in someone else's kingdom 🙂

🥸 Route to privacy

• 2024: After leaving X (ex-Twitter), I joined Mastodon but I've soon disabled my account (by end of March 2024). Leaving the GAFAM is an slow adventure I document through privacy-focused publications on this very blog.
• 2024: I continue to migrate to self-hosted solutions, like for Changedetection, Navidrome, Ntfy, Shaarli, ... long term goal is to leave Gmail, Google Docs, Dropbox, Spotify (✅ done by Nov 2024) etc.
• 2024: I keep deleting old accounts and whenever I see my personal emails still registered to something with value, I pick an alternative email instead. For newsletters, it's easy to pick Kill the Newsletter!.
• 2023: I've disabled GitHub, LinkedIn and try to get rid of WhatsApp, Spotify and any centralized solution etc in favor of privacy-first open-source federated/decentralized solutions or self-host my solutions.
• end of 2021: I've deactivated my Facebook, SensCritique, Instagram, Pinterest and X (ex-Twitter) accounts, in order to get time and peace of mind back.
• 💡 You will find more tips and articles and links I share about privacy.

⚙️ Colophon

• This site is rendered using WordPress engine, self-managed through Cloudron, hosted on Contabo Infrastructure (VPS) in Nuremberg DataCenter.
  • I don't recommend Contabo while it's cheap, I'm willing to migrate to a better likely a little more expensive VPS. Why ? Outages, unreliable DNS, unreliable object storage (prefer Hetzner Storage Box!). And don't get me started with their support. See also https://www.reddit.com/r/VPS/.
• Why WordPress instead of static site generators such as Hugo, Zola, Jekyll, Eleventy ? not because this is better for my taste or more indie, but because it helps me to focus on content rather than on tooling and dependencies updates, and the live editor makes me more productive even on a mobile phone. the day WordPress makes me sick, I could switch to Eleventy or to pure HTML website (check my page about 🌱 Web minimalism).
• The WordPress theme for this blog is Big Patterns.
• Images are not sufficiently compressed through WordPress so I rely on tools such as img2go's compress-image until I find better (maybe TinyPNG as mentioned in https://mycorrhiza.space/links)
• Font on this website is Miriam Libre - https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Miriam+Libre.

🌱 Giving back

• See my new /support page for the details 😊.

☕️ What's up with me

Glad that you are asking ! Check my /now page 😃.

🗺️ Where to find me

• I'm quite sedentary, so when I'm not working nearby Brussels Central station, I can spend some evenings at my favorite local 🍻 taproom/coffee-bar ☕️, namely La Fourmilière (Anderlecht) (Site).

💬 Contact me

• 💌 The best way to get in touch is via my email morgan at zoemp dot com. I speak (a lot) French, English and a bit of Dutch.