John Soda

Intro

Hi — I'm John Soda. Solution Architect and Information Security Officer. Linux person by conviction, polyglot by necessity. I spend most of my time in the place where devices, networks and operating systems all have an opinion about what should happen — and getting them to agree on one.

The job: pick the right protocol, the right language, and the right boring infrastructure for the problem in front of me. Then write the code that actually ships. Scroll down for the stack I work with.

Work

At the centre of everything: Linux — most days RHEL, Arch or Debian. It's the operating system I trust to keep its promises. The shell, the kernel and the journal are where most real work happens; everything else lives around that.

Around it:

• Languages — Python and TypeScript when moving fast matters, Rust and C++ when bytes and microseconds matter.
• Containers — Docker and Podman. Boring on purpose.
• Industrial protocols — MQTT and OPC-UA when devices need to talk.
• Wire formats — FlatBuffers, Protobuf, gRPC, MessagePack, JSON. Whichever the byte budget and the consumer demand.
• Infrastructure as code — SaltStack, Ansible, Pulumi. Configuration drift is a sign of weakness.
• Cloud — Azure, AWS, Hetzner Cloud. Whichever has the right primitives for the job at hand.
• Editing & shells — Vim and Neovim for serious editing, VSCode when the day calls for a mouse, POSIX shell for everything in between.

About

Mostly remote, Linux as a daily driver — no Windows, no macOS, no apology required. I like small, composable tools, configuration that lives in a git repo, and software that explains why rather than what. If a system can't be re-provisioned from a manifest, it doesn't really exist.

Outside the terminal I'm bad at standing still — if you bump into me somewhere and I'm not behind a screen, I'm probably doing something that involves either coffee, fresh air, or both.

Contact

Working on something interesting at the seam of Linux, devices and protocols? Or just want to argue about init systems? Drop me a line.

• Email
• GitHub

Elements

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';