Hi Crafters,
Over on the #systemcrafters IRC channel we really love to chit chat all day long, around the clock, 24/7… the topics are endless. Someone is always reinstalling Guix, tweaking an Emacs config, in tears trying to figure out which Lisp is the best, drinking a mimosa, discussing the JVM internals…the list goes on.
One day I thought it would be neat to interview one of the two people who were in the IRC back when I joined and the Matrix bridge was busted. That person is acdw, AKA Case. The other person was Fade, but he wouldn’t do an interview for less than $5000.
It took acdw a few months to get back to my questions, and I had forgotten all about them, but when I saw the email in my inbox I did a squeal in excitement! I hope you enjoy it, and if you too would like to be asked some crafty questions then you can send me a message on here or IRC and I might reject you based on if you like the Bash scripting language or not.
Meet the Crafters: acdw
How did you find the System Crafter’s community?
I honestly don’t remember, lol. Maybe I saw one of David’s videos or something?
What got you into computing and when did you become a “crafter”? What motivates you to craft your system or hack on programs?
I first installed linux as a dual-booter on my college laptop in my first
semester. It was this awful distro the name of which I don’t even remember
any more … something starting with G maybe but not Gobo or Gentoo. This
distro is definitely now defunct!
Anyway, because it was so awful I uninstalled it, removing Grub. But then my
windows was gone (of course it wasn’t but I didn’t know that at the time)! So I
installed I believe Ubuntu and the rest was history.
Now that I’m writing this though, I think I’ve always been a tinkerer. Opening
up the settings of programs to see what I could change, etc.
As far as the second part of your question — partly to mold my system to my
needs, partly because it’s fun, and partly for procrastination 
What is your career? … Why didn’t you pursue a tech career? Do you ever think you
will transition into one?
I have been a content writer for about 3 years full-time, which is the first time I’m
actually using my English degrees, lol. I’ve done a bunch of stuff, some of it
tech-adjacent, like working in a Tier I IT Role and this one gig I had where I
worked for a guy who was kinda doing programming stuff? idk.
I didn’t pursue a tech career b/c honestly, I dont think it occurred to me. I
didn’t get into tech like, as a thing to do until I was already probably a
junior in college. And idk, it just wasn’t on my radar.
As far as transitioning into one, I’m not sure if I want to program full-time at
least. It’s fun to do but I don’t know if as a job it’d be worth it. I have
thought about technical writing or something like that though!
What is your current setup like these days? Hardware/peripherals/OS/editor/tools…
My workputer is a MacOS whatever running Chrome. Since I work in automotive SEO
marketing, that’s pretty much all I need … everything we do is in Drive and
Salesforce and Slack. Oh, but I do use a Keychron K8 mech keyboard and … I
forget the brand but a trackball mouse which is great.
My funputer (what I’m writing this on) is a Thinkpad X240 which I bought a few
years ago off ebay. It’s currently running Alpine w/ i3 and I’m editing on
Emacs. For web browsing, I use Firefox. I used to really fiddle with my
configs and stuff but as I’ve gotten older, I find I just don’t care as much.
What is an average day like for acdw?
Workdays, I wake up, get my kid ready for “school” (daycare), eat breakfast, all
that – then sign into the workputer to get started on work. I WFH nowadays
which is great, though I really should work more activity into my days. After
the kiddo gets home I hang with him and my wife until he goes to bed around 7,
then we eat dinner if we haven’t already and read or watch TV or I do some
funputering until bedtime.
Weekends, we usually do family stuff like go to story time, church, hang with
friends, do the park, whatever.
Any hobbies outside of system crafting?
I love to cook! And bake bread, though I haven’t done so in a while. These
days I am writing a lot of my lua-based-lisp that isn’t fennel, lam. I guess
that’s not exactly system crafting, lol.
What is your funniest or scariest moment involving computers or the internet?
When I thought I totally borked my machine in the story above about installing
Linux probably. Or like, the two times I’ve lost all my school files (after
undergrad and after grad school) due to dumb backup (or non-backup) things.
Jello bello wello tello
Ah, a member of the secret society! I respond: “wibble wobble gibble gooble”
Any projects that you want to promote or suggest to the community?
ummm
-
MOONBOOKS! my friend started doing epubs every new moon of all the stuff he’d
written the previous month, and I just published the first one (I do it on the
full moon) of mine. They are fun and I recommend them, and writing epubs
isn’t too hard really. Just fiddly. -
tilde.town and the tildeverse in general (tildeverse.org)
You can find acdw on IRC (through his XMPP bridge) or at acdw.net or funputer.biz
