Devops | Full stack dev | Gamedev | Founder

TL;DR: Linux nerd → DevOps wrangler → indie gamedev. 🐧 → ☁️ → 🎮

• 2025 – now · 🎮 Founder, Land of Enchantment Games My indie gamedev studio, based in New Mexico.

• Also cooking 🍳: my side projects

  • merecatholicity.com (Git): my eclectic ecumenical project. It includes a self-published book, Mere Catholicity (public domain, typeset in LaTeX for PDF, paperback and Logos), a library of the Fathers, councils and classics re-typeset from public-domain sources, and merecat 🐈, an AI research librarian that answers from the library with citations. I built it serverless: a PureScript, lit-js and Tailwind front end over a custom headless API backend on Cloudflare Workers, with D1 (SQLite), R2 (S3-compatible storage) and Durable Objects for real-time chat. A GitHub Actions CI/CD system ships both the application and its Terraform infrastructure, with approval gates before production, staged rollouts and nightly tests against production. For the community side I borrowed the best bits of the old internet: 4chan-style auth, Snapchat-style DMs, Signal-style end-to-end encryption, and Facebook-style profiles and walls.
  • stasislinux.org (Git): my own Linux distro, the natural follow-through of my years as a package maintainer on KISS Linux with Dylan Araps.
  • backseat-driver: my tutor for keeping AI-era programmers' fundamentals sharp. Free for personal use; commercial licenses in the store for businesses.
  • .emacs.d: my Emacs config. It starts in about 0.2s, with everything deferred through use-package. It prefers built-ins (eglot, flymake), runs on vertico/corfu/tree-sitter, and binds the same SLIME-style keys in every language.

• 2020 – 2025 · ☁️ DevOps @ Upgrade, Inc. · Immaculata Studios, LLC · Skvare, LLC Herded Kubernetes, Terraform (5k+ lines of homegrown modules), AWS, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and a Postfix server that sent a million emails a month without landing in spam. Rode the industry's evolution from LAMP-stack monoliths to IaC-driven cloud microservices, right up to the arrival of AI automation, which is when I turned to solo gamedev.

• 2017 – 2020 · 🐧 Open Source Hermit Spent 10+ hours a day learning Linux from the kernel up. Maintained packages for KISS Linux, wrote docs for Funtoo, and built Themelios (a NixOS ZFS-on-root installer) and Spartan Emacs. Got commits merged upstream (e.g. libcap). Also went viral on Hacker News by booting my Linux distro with Emacs as init (systemE).

Professional music recording, and I play guitar. 🎸 Big fan of electronic music, house and techno. I enjoy vacationing in Greece. 🇬🇷 Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, and an avid fly fisherman. 🎣

My secondary GitHub, @el-sloppo, is where I push my favorite AI slop projects. Most of them live under Emacs-OS:

• embr.el: a web browser inside Emacs. Emacs is the display server and headless Chromium is the renderer, streamed over CDP screencast. It has EXWM-style key passthrough, optional Vimium-style modal navigation, and a native C rendering path built on the Emacs canvas patch. It doubles as a proof of concept for getting that patch mainlined.
• jellyfin-emms-mpv.el: browse and play your Jellyfin library from Emacs. Music goes through EMMS and video through mpv, with poster galleries, and playback position syncs back so "Continue Watching" stays accurate.
• elcava: a cava clone in pure Emacs Lisp. It captures system audio from PipeWire, runs the FFT in Elisp, and draws a live Unicode spectrum in a buffer.
• el-init: Emacs as PID 1, for real this time. It's a systemd-inspired service supervisor written in Emacs Lisp, with a dependency graph, targets, an M-x elinit dashboard and an elinitctl CLI, plus an optional static-build patchset that turns Emacs into an actual init. It's the spiritual sequel to systemE and the core of Emacs-OS.