About

Hi! I’m Simon, known across the internet as stwalkerster. I’m a mix of implementations consultant, site reliability engineer, and release engineer in my day job, and an open source developer and homelab hobbyist in my free time.

I’m the primary maintainer of three open-source projects – Helpmebot (source), Wikipedia’s Account Creation Assistance tool (“WACA”, or WP:ACC; source), and EyeInTheSky (source), amongst numerous smaller projects which don’t see much use. I’ve also contributed to a number of other open source projects where I’ve seen something interesting to fix, including MediaWiki, Git Extensions, and Castle Windsor.

Most of the code I write these days is either C# or shell scripts, though I do have fairly substantial experience with PHP too, though for new web-based projects I’m moving towards the ASP.NET Core platform.

I self-host (possibly too many) things out of a passion for learning new and old technologies – from the simple things such as this website, my IRC bots and clients, my development infrastructure including Phabricator and TeamCity, cloud storage in the form of NextCloud, all the way up to self-hosting my own email server.

In the time which remains, I feed a keen interest in home automation having built out a collection of services which work to control the house together and mostly offline using MQTT as the communications backbone, zigbee2mqtt, and Node-RED as the logic controller.

You’ll probably find me in various places around the internet, especially around Wikipedia and IRC.