About the author

Hi! I’m Roger, your host. A greying geek with love for GNU/Linux, BSD, code, privacy and security, and really, really loud black metal.

Background

I got started in my professional career as a programmer during the height of the dotcom bubble. At the time, I was working on porting a CRM application written mostly in Visual Basic to a web-based stack consisting of Windows 2000, MSSQL (Microsoft SQL Server), IIS (Internet Information Server), and ASP (Active Server Pages).

Anyhow, as the dotcom bubble eventually burst, the entire development team was let go. My next position was with a small company that did everything under the sky inolving technology that someone would pay for. For me, this meant abandoning everything Microsoft and transitioning to delivering Linux-based hosting services and (mostly web-based) custom applications.

More recently, I’ve been working for a few different companies until I got offered an interesting position with a startup back in January 2025. I never thought I would end up working as a programmer on a Microsoft stack again, but life is like a box of chocolates, and they don’t all taste good. At least .NET Core is open-source and cross-platform, so I don’t have to use a Windows machine for development.

Anyhow, I guess the mitigating factor is that this time around, I work for a company that is trying to help save the planet, no less.