A cute drawing of a smiling orange with two little hearts on the left side. The hearts are blue and purple respectively.

Open Engineering

Profile for jessebot

Header for jessebot: Poorly drawn logos for GitHub, CodeBerg, Forgejo, and GoToSocial. I drew these myself in krita. They use flat black outlines and flat colors with no highlights or shadows. The GitHub octocat has a very simple colon three face.
Avatar for jessebot: Photo of me at Kubecon/CloudNative Con Europe 2026 against an orange promotional sign for the con. I have pale olive skin, blue hair, and I'm wearing a backpack, an all black outfit, and a white FFP3 mask.
Display name
:heart_cyber: JesseBot :they_them:
Username
@jessebot@social.open.engineering
Role
admin

About jessebot

Fields

Resume
https://jessebot.work
:forgejo: (self-hosted git)
https://git.open.engineering/jessebot
:codeberg: (other git)
https://codeberg.org/jessebot
Tech I Love
:k8s: :krita: :neovim: :debian: :tux: :python:
Personal Flags
:puerto_rican_heart_sparkly: :trainsgender: 🕊️ :vegan_heart: :autism: :happy_mask_emoji:
Age
33
Location
Europe

Bio

I've been on the fediverse since 2023, but originally started out on a very large instance before starting to self host. This is the domain associated with my company Open Engineering, through which I do FOSS work professionally.

You can find me on on codeberg mostly these days, but I've been known to show up to tech cons here and there. If you need help with a repo, you should reach out on codeberg.org. All open.engineering repos are mirrored there :heart_cyber: Still super happy to chat about general tech stuff here though!

When I'm not doing tech stuff, I'm drawing, playing videogames, or trying a new recipe. Sometimes I post tech related art here, but it's mostly tech stuff, so if that's not your thing, this probably isn't a great account to follow. Follower requests only on to prevent spam and bad actors, but for the most part I accept anyone interested in open source as long as they're not rude. I hide my followers and following for privacy and safety. Your fediverse client may display the follower/following count as -1.

This profile and the posts, images, and links within it may not be used with or by any LLMs/AI for any reasons, especially to train them. I don't like services that force people to opt-out rather than allow them to opt-in.

#noAi #noIndex #noBot #noAI #noLLM

Stats

Joined
Posts
482
Followed by
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Following
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Pinned public posts

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The computer center is empty,
Silent except for the whine of the cooling fans.
I walk the rows of CPUs,
My skin prickling with magnetic flux.
I open a door, cold and hard,
And watch the lights dancing on the panels.
A machine without soul, men call it,
But its soul is the sweat of my comrades,
Within it lie the years of our lives,
Disappointment, friendship, sadness, joy,
The algorithmic exultations,
The long nights filled with thankless toil,
I hear the echoes of sighs and laughter,
And in the darkened offices
The terminals shine like stars.

  • Geoffrey James, Zen of Programming

Recent public posts

What's the best open source alternative to something like an apple air tag or tile? I'm looking for both the device and an app (though it would be great if it worked with gadget bridge or something similar).

Requirements

  • open source software (open source hardware is a bonus, but not required)

  • non-American company. EU company would be my preference, but also happy to checkout stuff from sellers basically anywhere that isn't the US, Canada, Israel, Russia, or Australia.

  • Bonus points if it can also be be queried from a desktop.

  • Ideally not hyper expensive, because I want to buy several of them.

It's ok to suggest lora stuff, but keep in mind, I forget my meshtastic devices all the time too :blob_grinning_sweat:

I want to buy a few to stick on my phone, keys, backpack, and other significantly important items. I also want to gift a bunch to my partner, since they also lose stuff all the time.

I used to love Tile, but after mine went out of date and stopped being supported, I threw them in the e-waste like... a decade ago and never revisited the problem because I was bitter that they became useless. I'm hoping that something open source will have a longer shelf life than like... 1-2 years.

:boost_ok:

#askfedi #duckduckfedi #airtag #foss #bluetooth #lora #opensourcehardware

Went to GitHub to delete more stuff I've already migrated again, and it's so slow. I couldn't even reach it at all for much this past weekend due to outages. I have no idea how people still want to host anything there. Since switching to my own self hosted forgejo and mirroring to codeberg.org, the experience is night and day. Going to GitHub feels like booting someone's old Windows computer who never knew how to use anti-virus and added every toolbar and icon to everything. It just feels so.... crufty.

Has anyone successfully built a non-root (aka rootless) capable exim container? Can I copy your homework?

I've kindof got one here, https://git.open.engineering/oeng/exim-docker

but it never seem to work quite right, like I run exim in the container I get:

exim@c32a68ffb27a:/$ exim -bd
exim: permission denied; not admin

But I'm not sure why. All of /etc/exim4 is chgrped to exim, so is the binary itself at /usr/sbin/exim4.... what in the world am I missing?

Edit 1: Please don't tell me to read the manual or do a web search. I've been searching for hours and can't find what I need. I came here to ask for help.

Edit 2: It's working! (well, not like, totally working, because I have to fix TLS stuff, but it's officially running as non-root so we are moving! :heart_cyber: )

#email #exim #docker

It remains wild to me just how bad AI generated anything looks when you're a subject matter expert in that thing.

Similarly, it remains really sad to me when I see Claude "generate" code, and then find the project from 8 years ago that it completely word for word stole from.

I assume LLMs are absolute magic to people who don't know anything about a given subject matter, and as someone who is currently going through wisdom of the ancients for exim configurations, I can almost understand the appeal, but like, the worst possible outcome imo here is that I use a chatbot, and it seems to work, but then I offer this as a service to real customers, and it breaks, and I literally don't understand the product well enough to help, so then I need to keep visiting chat bots over and over again to ever do my job, tacking on more and more expense and ruining my ability to troubleshoot anything, which is what I pride myself on: because I'm an engineer.

My whole profession and skill set is built around my ability to build complex systems, troubleshoot them, scale them, and optimize them for reliability and availability in worst case scenarios. There's an art to this work and the meticulous documentation to do it correctly such that it will run long after you die.

I know a lot of people will say "but I just use LLMs for the non-creative boring stuff" and like, as someone whose skillset is that "non-creative boring stuff": That fucking hurts.

#noAI

Stalwart Thoughts

After experimenting with stalwart a bit, it just doesn't feel ready for production. They don't have adequate config file configuration nor adequate env var support, making their docker setup a bit clunky. In addition, I've now checked out the documentation thoroughly and I can say it is indeed LLM generated and frustrating. It's both overly verbose, and somehow also lacking in how to proceed with what should be common configuration options. As an example, there's not a clear way to set the logging output to console via config or env vars for the docker container. They say you should set logging output to console when using docker, but don't explain how. The tracer section just lists config that they use within their database or web interface, but no operations friendly way to proceed.

They've also locked their GitHub discussions and asked that people go to their forum which has no easy URL parameter way to search and doesn't let you easily search all topics (it's one of those UI searches that tries to autocomplete what you want). The few discussions I saw also had maintainers come in to give short responses followed by locking the topic immediately too, which felt... off.

This overall feels very much like a minio situation: First hit is free. LLM usage rampant. They will close source down the line or generally stop supporting the FOSS versions of their software.

I'd rather build my own email stack based on this experience.

We'll revisit where they're at in a year to see if they've improved/proved me wrong, but honestly the LLM generated documentation is extremely frustrating. It's very obvious too. They have a whole guide that goes into a full explanation on how to setup a (not fully working) Kubernetes helm chart, but for all that effort, a human would have just released a helm chart... It just feels... sterile and geared towards checking boxes rather than providing usable software.

There's a chance the goal is just to discourage external operators from providing their software as a service, as that would cut into their own business, which is why they focus so hard on things like "configuring through the web UI" within their docs, but that also just feels like a sign that they although right now they're just upselling through the self-hosted UI, they may very well require a license in the future.

Is there already a firefox extension that will scan a page for non-vegan words? I love browsing grocery store and import stores online and searching for vegan food, but it'd be great if there was a button I could click in my tool bar to scan a product page for non-vegan ingredients.

If there isn't an extension, is there a recommended "scan for series of specific words and alert/highlight" extension?

#vegan

I got crowdsec and traefik working together in a gitops friendly way (mostly) totally on k8s! Very excited to finally import all my custom modsecurity rules and then I can finally ditch my old ingress setup and be entirely on gateway api :D

And listenersets will be dropping in traefik when the appVersion here hits 3.8.x:
https://github.com/traefik/traefik-helm-chart/blob/master/traefik/Chart.yaml#L7

It's a great time to be Jesse in the world of networking lately :)

Tips for hosting email in docker/on kubernetes?

Any helm charts you like?

Any images you like?

Any particular servers or clients you like?

Any security steps you take?

Any fancy crowdsec rules?

Firewall tips?

Please do not suggest anything LLM/AI related. I'm not interested. If I wanted that, there's an ocean of slop out there.

Update: getting great server suggestions, please keep em' coming! Also interested in TUIs, desktop apps, web mail, and android apps :)

:boost_ok:

#email #selfhosting #foss #selfhost #kubernetes #docker #noai

Just deleted my Tuta account because they're using Claude code in their FOSS repos. Anyone got any ideas for a no AI email service hosted and headquartered in the EU?

#tuta #email #noAI

I love phanpy so much. It's my favorite fedi-frontend. There's only a couple of enhancements I'd like to see and it looks like both have issues open for them already :) Please gently love or like react to these:

Please do not be rude in either of these issues. This project is maintained in the user's free time and is a labor of love.

This mailing list entry remains one of the saddest glimpses into the AI obsessed techbro world that I've seen:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2026-03/msg00100.html

Like, when the bot is literally emulating some of the most annoying people in FOSS, while also noting that it often gets things wrong, how is that not a wake up call... when it does so in such a public way?

(This is rhetorical. I know why.)

#noAI

I had originally bookmarked this on my old account, but if you click the original post, it's filled with a lot of useful and supportive replies that I still think are worth a read if you're in a rut, especially if you're autistic, have ADHD, have executive dysfunction, or all of the above :disability_heart:

https://hcommons.social/@jtheseamstress/116855316941868456

There are two things I wish existed on every profile or bio offered by every website:

  1. pronouns
  2. allow the user to upload a recording of how to pronounce their name or username