Today we are going to interview a busy member of an important BSD community, known for the amazing dragonflydigest project.
Who is Justin Sherrill?
I’m a middle-aged white guy in the tech field in the northeast US. I’m already a certain level of average just from that description.
Tell us about your involvement with open source software. How did it start?
I desperately needed a FTP server for my work somewhere around 1998, and installed FreeBSD 4. It worked where other Windows setups were toppling over, so I kept pulling it out as a server from then on.
What is your role in the DragonFly community? By the way, is it a meritocracy?
I read a quote from I think Jean-Louis Gassee that each operating system needs an atmosphere; things around it that are not the operating system itself. I started the DragonFly Digest to try to increase the amount of BSD-centric dialog. It’s much better these days than it used to be.
In the recent release of DragonFly BSD 6.0, I read that you would be the guy to tag the version. How does this process work? Is it just a simple command or does it involve multiple activities?
DragonFly was I think the first BSD to change over to git. The process is documented on the DragonFly website, but it’s pretty straighforward – releases branch, and everything after that for the given release is a tag placement. It makes it easier to keep it straight; you are either on development or release, and there’s only one point to look at, the current tag.
What do you do for a living? / Does open source pay your bills?
Sort of; my day job uses FreeBSD as a base for a secure telephony product. I don’t think many people know about it, or how widely it’s used. I’m not directly involved in the platform development, though.
Can you tell us about your computers’ setup?
Entirely leftovers and castoffs; I have an ancient Lenovo x220 that I don’t want to give up because it was the last generation with the Good Keyboard, and cast-off corporate server parts for my domain hosting and home network.
And what about the software you use in that hardware? Distros, window managers, editors, programming languages, etc?
The Digest is WordPress running on of course DragonFly. I started out with Movable Type and changed to WordPress years ago for reasons, I don’t remember what. The WordPress toolkit has become much larger and I like what Automattic does as a company, so any objections I had – and I remember I did, but they were mostly fussy things like not liking PHP – have evaporated.
From the content produced by dragonflydigest.com, you seem like a guy who thinks outside the box. My sincere congratulations, man! What is the secret to producing such an exotic and interesting collection of news every week?
I have a huge number of RSS feeds and there are certain topics that I always look for – Apple 2 history, UNIX history, quirky hardware projects, interesting music.
Are you a minimalist?
I suppose so; at least in terms of organization. I prefer a clean desk, a clean layout, a clean method for any process. I also like to overload descriptive terms.
What about your “outside the Matrix” activities? What do you enjoy doing when you’re away from computers?
I work two other jobs – at a local bakery, and starting my own chocolate company. I don’t really have any time outside of that, but at least I always have croissants and chocolate to hand.
