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Interview with Jeff Geerling
- willk 3y agoJeff is great. I always look forward to seeing his videos on YouTube. I’m really happy for him and his success.
- jahsome 3y agoUtterly wholesome is the perfect description. It's an instant click from me any time his videos (or hn posts) pop up. I get the same feeling from Jeff's videos I did when I watched PBS as a kid. That's not a dig; I find his videos extremely calming, informative, and well produced. The man radiates positivity and kindness. That's a rarity these days on YouTube. Presumably "high energy" content does better algorithmically, but for me personally the false enthusiasm, or manufactured outrage trends grow old rather quick.
- astrodust 3y agoNo yelling, clickbait or scandals, it's actually great.
- throw235398 3y agoRegarding scandals, I'm glad he stopped mixing extreme religious ideologies with tech content on the blog. He also seems to be brand loyal, but I'm being too harsh.
- michaelsbradley 3y agoHeaven forbid someone shares their sincere religious beliefs on their personal blog.
- Smoosh 3y agoNo, I don’t think that’s too harsh. I’m in agreement with you on both those points. I still watch his videos but am now more aware of the context influencing the content.
- geerlingguy 3y agoI posted elsewhere; the blog started off in 2003-ish on HTML, then Xanga, migrated to Thingamablog (Static Site Generator before it was cool), then Drupal. I started writing on the blog 20 years ago while in high school and college. I like leaving up the old to help people see not everyone comes straight out of the womb with the same maturity and style of someone in their 30s/40s. I still have a lot to learn, and I imagine I would say the same thing when I hit my 40 year blogiversary :)
- hashtag-til 3y agoMaybe a minor thing, but also interesting to highlight Raspberry Pi blog layout, not polluted with "subscribe me please" crap. Quite reassuring that there are still nice places on the internet.
- leosanchez 3y agoBut it still has cookie popup crap right ?
- hashtag-til 3y agoThat is legally required in some places, I guess.
- ndriscoll 3y agoBecause of the tracking scripts.
- prmoustache 3y agoNot really, it is only legally required if you act badly.
- myself248 3y agoIt's not legally required to use cookies. They could just not use cookies.
- hashtag-til 3y agoActually, you got a point.
- dualboot 3y agoJeff is awesome, and only mentioning it because I have the same experience with Adrian Black's videos (Adrian's Digital Basement.) I would have killed for this kind of content as a youth.
- ecliptik 3y agoA bit different, but this is why I like watching Decino [1] who makes WAD playthroughs and analysis videos of Doom. No yelling or clickbait titles, just someone calmly playing Doom and while explaining game mechanics and level design. 1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G7ueWjVFJo8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G7ueWjVFJo8
- Nexxxeh 3y agoNot like that damned Red Shirt Jeff. I don't trust THAT guy at all.
- MR4D 3y agoRSJ got promoted to management. Twice. Red Shirt Jeff forever!!!! https://redshirtjeff.com/ https://redshirtjeff.com/
- pachouli-please 3y agoI love all Geerling's projects, writings, and videos over the years. I was actually concerned that based on the brevity of the title that something tragic had happened. Glad that's not the case!
- squidbeak 3y agoSame reaction here, when I read the title I reflexively yelled out "No!" Geerling's an excellent trailblazer, explainer, and all round lovely guy, and his specialties are much broader than just R-Pi.
- jgwil2 3y agoProbably the headline auto "correcter" lopped off the "Meet" part of the original title. Yet another example of that piece of software being too clever by half if you ask me.
- progbits 3y agoThis is the stupidest HN feature. It does very little for clickbait (flagging and voting is better), and routinely screws up titles to the point it drastically changes or reverses their meaning.
- throw932490 3y ago[flagged]
- sfsdf343425 3y agoBut the software for other SBCs is extremely bad, I've never heard of any Pi on release or after that has any software or hardware bugs. Proprietary blobs aren't that bad with Broadcom...
- throw932490 3y ago[dead]
- sfsdf343425 3y agoBaseline RAM Pi are still magnitudes cheaper, its a moot/niche above 2GB for most makers. Pi doesn't have to cater to lite servers only... Gotta admit that Pi foundation never cared about batteries, especially since it's common with makers, audio removal etc...
- throw932490 3y agoPi4 2GB with power source, SD card, case, fan is like $100. You can have nice Atom MiniPC for that. Or old PC from ebay...
- sfsdf343425 3y agoBut these are used, cheap new Atom miniPC doesn't have GPIO, and brand new Atom SBCs with GPIO are more $$$ with the same SoC compared to miniPC since they aren't mass produced. A used Pi with sdcard/case/fan is much less than $40.
- ThrowawayR2 3y agoUSB GPIO dongles are a cheap addon to any x86 PC, e.g. "Adafruit General Purpose USB to GPIO" at https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264 https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264
- davisr 3y agoThis is the guy who kicked up all the dirt about Red Hat, which IMO was entirely overblown. Not to say that he's a bad dude...but be careful of who you listen to on the Internet.
- sfsdf343425 3y agoGotta admit that the writing is very good and his content are entertaining, regardless of the content or (mis)information.
- jchw 3y agoWhy do you feel it is particularly overblown?
- emptysongglass 3y agoBecause so much of it was just completely false. Jeff positioned Red Hat as going against the community, which wasn't the case at all. The "bad actors" were squarely Rocky and Alma who just wanted to sell the exact same ten year support enterprise Red Hat as Red Hat themselves without any work. Well, Red Hat said, you want it, you go get it in Stream, which has a 5 year lifecycle. The only companies that need ten year lifecycles are the same consumers Red Hat caters to with RHEL. Red Hat is continuing to honor all its licensing terms. It just isn't doing its freeloading competitors any favors. And yes: they're freeloaders. Red Hat's choice never touched the community in any way. As a hobbyist who uses Red Hat stuff, I'm not using RHEL, and even if I was, Red Hat gives generous licenses for hobbyists like me. Jeff (and everybody else) jumped on the hate bandwagon. It wasn't kind, it was mob behavior, and it completely lacked any nuance.
- geerlingguy 3y agoThat sounds like some great revisionist history. Thousands of sysadmins, open source devs, even Hatters themselves used CentOS as a proxy for RHEL where they didn't want to deal with licensing crap. In the middle of the CentOS 8 lifecycle, they converted CentOS to CentOS Stream (nobody asked for this), forcing everyone who had migrated their tooling and infra from CentOS 7 to 8 to migrate instead to... what? Rocky/Alma stepped in and saved the day for all those folks. Then in the middle of the CentOS Stream 9 lifecycle, they hid some of the sources required for rebuilding a CentOS-equivalent (at least simply/easily) behind a Red Hat account and told the community they should be happy with 16 dev licenses for RHEL if they truly needed RHEL compatibility. As I said then, "no thanks."
- sfsdf343425 3y agoJeff is incredible, his brother works for RPi manufacturing I think looking at the factory tour. He's not biased at all when it comes to comparing the Pi to the competition in his blogs, I mean erm clones, there is no competition anyways. Jeff Geerling blog: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog
- geerlingguy 3y agoNo, brother is a neurologist up in Iowa :) The guy who was in that Pi factory tour looks similar but is my British doppelgänger.
- dang 3y agoPlease don't use throwaway accounts like this. It's against the site guidelines and we ban accounts that do it, and eventually it will get your main account banned as well. As https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html explains, throwaway accounts are fine for sensitive information but you certainly shouldn't be using multiple ones in the same thread.
- optimus_banana 3y agoI remember when geerlingguy was just the author of all the ansible roles I happened to use, crazy to see how much of a "personality" he is now.
- squidbeak 3y agoI remember when he was just midwesternmac and explaining tricky Drupal stuff. He's been brilliantly intelligible with everything he covers.
- geerlingguy 3y agoHeh, few remember the very early days when I ran a forum on midwesternmac.com — I actually started out doing IT services and web hosting (mostly Drupal, some Wordpress) for local places. The first project I did as an independent LLC was built out a network with a bunch of eMacs and a central G4 server for a law firm :P
- hackmiester 3y agoI too took the path of working my way backward in the LAMP stack :)
- Jgrubb 3y agoTotally, it seems like every tech thing I’ve gotten to in the last 12 years or so - Drupal, Ansible, rpi, a few other things I can’t think of right now - geerlingguy was there a few years before I found it.
- uncomputation 3y agoCan the title be updated to include the “Meet”? Otherwise it’s a bit ominous…
- bdsa 3y ago(On reflection, this is irrelevant.)
- DeIlliad 3y agoBefore clicking on the link I thought you meant he was writing articles on Ansible and putting his non-Ansible opinions in the same articles. I have no problem with him writing his thoughts on his blog, whether they are on Ansible, abortion, or anything else.
- throwaway6734 3y agoWhat's uncomfortable about it? Good people will have different opinions than you on controversial issues. Understanding that is the cornerstone of a tolerant liberal society. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
- Uehreka 3y agoWow. Skimming through that article, the articles linked at the bottom and some of Jeff’s comments and replies to the articles, he comes across way more hardcore and intense than the chill, wholesome guy I’m used to seeing. The stuff I just read was from over a decade ago, so maybe he’s changed, or maybe the only thing that’s changed is how outspoken he is about this. I like Jeff’s work, this bums me out.
- user_7832 3y agoDo you know which article did the OP link? They've edited their comment.
- geerlingguy 3y agoMost likely one of the blog posts I wrote in the early 00s about abortion. I started writing my blog in 2004, and decided to leave up almost everything from the earliest days when it was on Xanga, then Thingamablog (SSG before it was cool!), and now Drupal. Unlike most people, I'd rather be an open book. I figure intelligent people can understand how something written in high school/college days two decades ago can reflect on personality, while also understanding that those words are likely not the same words the person would write today. It's also why I leave up my very early YouTube videos. It's not like everyone who has seen some success in their 30s/40s popped out of the womb the way they are today!
- riffic 3y agothe Mansible of Ansible
- nirav72 3y agoBecause of Geerling's early videos on Ansible - I started looking into Ansible and learning it. Also, went down the rabbit hole on how to compile a kernel. (For no real reason other than I could).
- TheNewsIsHere 3y agoI’m going to start referring to Jeff this way. I bought a used print copy of his book during lockdown and bought the digital copy to directly support him. He’s a good writer on the page as well as a good hands-on/interactive instructor.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y agoAdd something like „Interview with” or „Meet” to the title, please. Whenever I see just a name on HN, I expect an obituary. Got a few more gray hairs from seeing this.
- DistractionRect 3y agoIt's always fun to stumble on Jeff's content organically. I feels like whatever I'm looking up, The GeerlingGuy has done it first. He deserves all the good vibes.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoIn I think 2019 or 2020, I found some of Jeff's stuff online. I realized I actually had a pi in a box somewhere I'd won in a hackathon way back when. Set it up. I'd been doing a lot of linux sysadmin stuff in the past and kinda missed having a server I could upload stuff to. I set up a blog and some other stuff. Got lured into Jeff's cluster shenanigans and got a few more pis and set up a tiny cluster with various services I found useful[1]. I built a bunch of services from scratch. Eventually my hybris grew and I started drawing up plans for my own search engine, running off this cluster. I figured why not, covid was coviding and I had a lot of time. Turns out you need more than bunch of pis to run a n internet search engine, so I got a bigger server. Still my first iteration indexded like 200k docs. One thing turned into another and now I've quit my job to work on this full time. Weird how the world works sometimes. I guess what I wanted to say is: Thanks, Jeff. [1] This was before the semiconductor shortage, back when pis were abundant. Sorry if I contributed to any shortages. I've sold off the ones I didn't end up using :)
- sureglymop 3y agoSo that's the origin of your search engine! Wow. Both Jeff and you are amazing. Keep it up and keep building cool stuff. :)
- TheBozzCL 3y agolol that’s very similar to what’s been happening to me: I have a 6-Pi cluster at home, running Docker Swarm + Portainer + GlusterFS to host a series of services I use daily. That includes a blog that I’ve been afraid to post to because the project grew so big I wouldn’t even know where to start.
- jcdavis 3y agoBesides all his (excellent) tech stuff, I'm really thankful for Jeff being so public about his struggles with Crohn's. I'm fortunate to have a far more moderate case, but in general there isn't a ton of awareness about the disease and its super brave of him to use his platform to talk about his health issues.
- criddell 3y ago> It’s like the tool world: I use DEWALT mostly, because the first tool I bought was a DEWALT. So you gotta use the DEWALT battery, and then you’re like, well, I could buy this cheaper tool, it’s better. But then it won’t work with my battery. So now I have something like 25 DEWALT tools. Oh man, this is something I wish the EU would work on fixing. There's no reason there couldn't be a battery standard.
- geerlingguy 3y agoI hate it :( At least with the tools, if you pick a brand like DeWalt or Milwaukee... they have been around for decades and will stay around for decades, and the tools don't just die if the company gets bought out. Well, at least until 'smart' tools start getting forcibly pushed into the market. But Internet connectivity is bad enough in many construction environments that it might never happen (we can hope...).
- lostapathy 3y agoIf only this was true! I have a bunch of Makita cordless tools (and IME, Makita was #1 for pros 10-15 years ago, not a niche brand). Several years ago (2015-ish?) they changed up the battery shape a little bit so newer batteries wouldn't fit on older tools. It was to add another pin so the battery could tell the tool it was dead and quit drawing power (why the battery couldn't just cut power is beyond me). So (at the time) I had a drawer full of year-old tools that wouldn't work with the extra batteries I just bought. As it turns out, you can file down part of the tool body and the new batteries fit old tools, but without the power protection. So they didn't end up in the landfill, but it's still hugely annoying.
- ensignavenger 3y agoYup, I have a Dewalt set, with their older battery design.... unfortunately my batteries are getting old, the tools are fine, but I can't get the old batteries, and if I buy new tools, they will use the new batteries. So... do I buy aftermarket batteries for my existing tools, or get rid of my existing tools and switch to whatever brand next? It is silly.
- hendersoon 3y agoGeerling is just utterly delightful. Comes across smart, friendly, and razor sharp-- particularly in facing serious adversity, I don't know that I'd bounce back EVER if I had a colostomy bag in my 30s. I'm a fan.
- SCUSKU 3y agoAh! Always love to see something from Jeff, glad he's getting the recognition he deserves. He's such a smart guy but very humble. An inspiration to us all!
- jchw 3y ago> Philosophically I can understand that stance, but don’t call it open source: call it ‘source available’ Yep, agreed. Huge pet peeve of mine as well. It's not like anyone's under any obligations to provide any sort of rights, but at some point you have to admit that the term "open source" comes with a lot of expectations and norms that licenses like BSL just simply do not meet, and trying to call your project "open source" or call BSL in the "spirit" of open source is just misleading.
- apple4ever 3y agoJeff is awesome! I met him at AnsibleFest 2022, and he was very friendly despite not feeling well (I did not take up much of his time when I realized that, FYI). Nobody even mentioned his books! His Ansible for DevOps book I have used at 2 companies to teach Ansible. He's an amazing guy and our industry is better off for having him in it.