self portrait

About me

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.


👨‍👩‍👦 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 Gitea 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.

Work

For a living I do help keeping cloud costs minimal and human work frictionless, 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, automations), and being more human (teamwork, education) with the aim of leaving things better than I've found them.

In 2022, I've shifted from employment to freelancing in 2022. At this time I'm no longer looking for new opportunities as I work full time at Ibanity. 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

  • Git is crap, i.e. is not intuitive to solve some simple problems and its glossary and hence its UX is crap. I probably need to elaborate here. Please push me if you want such blog post 🙂 see also Ideas.
  • Advice does not work (archive).
  • Anti-spam techniques propagated by CloudFlare & co are harming for the accessibility of Internet. See also part of my critique through Dark patterns collection and Ideas.
  • Helm is crap. Instead check Werf, CUE, Timoni.
  • JavaScript everywhere is still crap in 2024 (archive) and makes the web bloated (archive), i.e obese (archive).
  • Software in general is bloated and discriminates users with slow devices (Google webcache) (wallabag archive).
  • Ruby is crap.
  • 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.
  • 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 call AI now is crap and is harming our planet 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.
  • Delegation is a double edged sword (disillusions, incompetence, drama...).
  • Better shipped incomplete than WIP forever.
  • Social media is crap. Don't be too dependent on any platform or social media for publishing or hosting your content / business, things don't last. You can mirror your work to those platforms, but you have to own the source. 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.
  • 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.
  • Do not act in a hurry if possible. Patience is key.
  • More via Git - Principles and Git - OhShit.

💭 Quotes

  • Quality is always right.
  • Trust but verify.
  • A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for. i.e don't waste your talent.
  • 🫀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.
  • I’m not after the money - I’m 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.

Follow me

  1. Through my RSS feeds.
  2. Have a look at 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. I'm just here and everything important is on this blog, this is fine and I enjoy this independence away from censorship and tracking 🙂

Route to privacy

  • 2024: I in the meantime joined Mastodon but I've disabled my account by end of March 2024. This is an adventure I document through privacy-focused publications on this very blog. I'm currently trying to leave the GAFAM.
  • 2024: I continue to migrate to self-hosted solutions, like for Changedetection, Navidrome, Wallabag, Ntfy, Shaarli, ... long term goal is to leave Gmail, Google Docs, Dropbox, Spotify 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 I'm trying 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.
  • I'm sharing some tips and articles about privacy. For more, please check my Shaarli.

Colophon

Giving back

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

What's up with me

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

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.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *