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Hello! My name is Linus Arver and this is my personal website.
1 About me
Originally from Seoul, South Korea, I spent most of my adolescence and adult life in the USA (California and Washington state). After getting married to my Australian wife during Covid, we moved to Melbourne, Australia in 2024.
Careerwise, I actually went to law school after college, only to find out that I really did not enjoy that field (I strongly recommend not going to law school unless you absolutely are 100% sure you want to be there). I developed a hobby for programming while still in law school, and eventually wound up joining a tech startup in 2015. I've been in tech ever since.
2 On Programming
I have way too much fun writing computer programs. It is by far my favorite hobby, ever since I rediscovered it in 2009. There's just something about making the computer solve your problems that just never gets old...!
2.1 Recommended Software
For serious work, I use free/open-source software almost exclusively as much as possible. Below are some of them.
NixOS - my favorite OS
nix-darwin - gives you NixOS-like configuration for your Mac
Commit Mono - my favorite monospaced font
WezTerm - a terminal emulator, configurable with Lua
tmux - terminal multiplexer
xmonad - the crash-proof tiled window manager
Emacs - an advanced text editor
Doom Emacs - Emacs with batteries included
Qutebrowser - a lightweight browser with Vim bindings
Org Mode - sufficiently flexible note-taking system
TeX Live - programmable typesetting
3.1 Git Rev News: Edition 109 (March 31st, 2024) Developer Spotlight
Some months after I started contributing to Git, the community kindly asked me for an interview. What an honor!
3.2 The Great "k8s.gcr.io" Vanity Domain Flip (November 2020)
A tale about what happened behind the scenes in the Kubernetes community infrastructure-wise in 2019-2020, while the rest of the world slept. Special thanks to Stephen Augustus from VMware who pitched the idea for the talk initially and helping with the recording as well.
3.3 Git: Your Favorite Tool (July 2015)
These slides are from a talk I gave internally at Twin Prime (they were later acquired by SalesForce). I designed the slides so that they are readable as-is, without a real presentation. Last but not least, I hereby release these slides into the Public Domain --- do whatever you like with them!
3.4 Bitscans and De Bruijn Sequences (2014)
I wrote this paper originally in 2011--2012, but it was not released until it was finally revised in 2014.
4 Contact
Please email me at linus@ucla.edu for anything related to this blog. I have long since graduated from UCLA, but they gave me a lifetime email address. Thank you, UCLA!
4.1 Accounts on other sites
Somewhat active:
GitHub (listx)
Online Go Server (funloop)
Reddit (listx)
Historical artifacts:
Exercism (listx)
DeviantArt (magic-byte)
5 About this site
I originally started a blog about various programming-related things here (late 2000s), but I wanted more control over how the content is generated/stored, and so I created here in 2013. This version used Hakyll as the static site generator. In 2026, I switched away from Hakyll to Lilac, a custom literate programming tool I developed, while retaining most of the original content as is. The source code of the latest version is also hosted in Sourcehut here. See Publishing the site for details around how the site is built with and published to Sourcehut.
Most of this site is for my Blog. However, there is also a Projects page where you can navigate to other software projects that have their own set of documentation.