About

Why this site exists.

Terminal Stupidity is a working archive, not a résumé. I am a systems programmer working out of the Pacific Northwest, and for several years I have been accumulating small command-line programs — some deliberate, some accidental, some written in a fugue state at 2am to answer a question I could no longer avoid. This site is where I keep the ones I do not want to lose.

The name is sincere. Many of these tools are stupid in the technical sense: they solve a problem in a way that is obvious, direct, and unembarrassed by how the problem is normally solved. A shell script with a histogram loop. A profiler that refuses to draw a flame graph. A disassembler you point at a stream. Most of the good tools I have ever used were like this, and most of the bad ones were not.

How I work

I build small programs that do one thing, run on any Unix I can reach, and avoid dependencies that outnumber the source files. I prefer C, Rust, and POSIX sh, in that order, and I will write Python when Python is what the problem is asking for. I read the manual page before I write the program, and I write a manual page before I publish the program.

I do not ship telemetry. I do not require accounts. I do not assume a terminal wider than 80 columns unless it pleases the output to assume otherwise. None of these are ideological positions; they are consequences of having been on the receiving end of tools that made the opposite assumptions.

Background

Before this, fifteen years of infrastructure work at various scales — a trading firm that preferred not to be named even internally, a storage startup that was acquired and then largely dismantled, two stints in research labs where the computers were interesting and the politics were worse. The through-line is always the same: small sharp tools, written close to the problem.

Engagements

I take on a narrow band of consulting work, almost always through someone I have already worked with. The sweet spot is: "we have a weird performance problem in a system that has been running for five years and nobody currently on the team wrote the original version." I have also done a fair amount of expert witness and technical diligence work, which I enjoy more than I expected to.

New engagements are considered by introduction only. If you arrived here without one, the Notes page is probably what you want — most of what I would say in a first meeting is already written down there.