About me: My name is Solène Rapenne, pronouns she/her. I like learning and sharing knowledge. Hobbies: '(BSD OpenBSD Qubes OS Lisp cmdline gaming security QubesOS internet-stuff). I love percent and lambda characters. OpenBSD developer solene@. No AI is involved in this blog.

Contact me: solene at dataswamp dot org or @solene@bsd.network (mastodon).

I'm a freelance OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Linux and Qubes OS consultant, this includes DevOps, DevSecOps, technical writing or documentation work. If you enjoy this blog, you can sponsor my open source work financially so I can write this blog and contribute to Free Software as my daily job.

News about the blog

Written by Solène, on 11 September 2018.
Tags: #highlight

Comments on Fediverse/Mastodon

Today I will write about my blog itself. While I started it as my own documentation for some specific things I always forget about (like “How to add a route through a specific interface on FreeBSD”) or to publish my dot files, I enjoyed it and wanted to share about some specific topics.

Then I started the “port of the week” things, but as time goes, I find less of those software and so I don’t have anything to write about. Then, as I run multiples servers, sometimes when I feel that the way I did something is clean and useful, I share it here, as it is a reminder for me I also write it to be helpful for others.

Doing things right is time consuming, but I always want to deliver a polished write. In my opinion, doing things right includes the following:

  • explain why something is needed
  • explain code examples
  • give hints about potential traps
  • where to look for official documentation
  • provide environment informations like the operating system version used at the writing time
  • make the reader to think and get inspired instead of providing a material ready to be copy / pasted brainlessly

I try to keep as much as possible close to those guidelines. I even update from time to time my previous articles to check it still works on the latest operating system version, so the content is still relevant. And until it’s not updated, having the system version let the reader think about “oh, it may have changed” (or not, but it becomes the reader problem).

Now, I want to share about some OpenBSD specifics features, in a way to highlight features. In OpenBSD everything is documented correctly, but as a Human, one can’t read and understand every man page to know what is possible. Here come the highlighting articles, trying to show features, how to use it and where they are documented.

I hope you, reader, like what I write. I am writing here since two years and I still like it.