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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 my mid 20s. There's just something about making the computer solve your problems that just never gets old!

2.1 My tech stack

For serious work, I use free/open-source software almost exclusively as much as possible. The list below has evolved over the years, but I do try to keep it up to date.

• NixOS: I started using this around 2015 as my daily driver, mainly because it was the only OS out there that was on a rolling release (if you use the unstable branch) which also had clean rollbacks (uninstalls) of packages. Sadly the idea of functional package management hasn't really caught on enough, and as of 2026 the only other purely functional OS out there is Guix, which is itself based on Nix.

• nix-darwin: Gives you NixOS-like configuration for your Mac. Basically this is the path of least resistance if you want to install a daemon (like Docker) cleanly on Mac.

• Commit Mono: My favorite monospaced font. I used to use Terminus for a long time, but with higher DPI screens needed something that looked really nice. The main advantage of this font is it adjusts letters dynamically based on what other letters are nearby --- which does make a noticeable difference.

• WezTerm: I used urxvt originally because it had Unicode support, then moved to Alacritty for performance reasons. I then moved on to WezTerm because of the flexibility provided by the Lua-based configuration.

• tmux: You can't use a shell without tmux. I have a nice nested tmux configuration which makes using this super convenient when I'm SSH'ed into another (more powerful) remote machine.

• xmonad: I've used this since 2009... but to be honest once I got my tmux configuration up to speed (during Covid when I had to start working remotely), the window manager itself just started mattering less. That's because I spend most of my time inside tmux, which makes most of the features of XMonad (or any other window manager) moot.

• Emacs: Ah, the one true text editor. I originally used Vim for a number of years before moving to Emacs around 2011, pretty soon after the evil project became usable. Unlike most people I use Emacs inside a terminal, and because of my extensive modifications I'm able to use all of my keyboard's modifiers (just like in GUI emacs). I need to blog about this one day...

• Doom Emacs: I used to have a custom Emacs configuration, but the cost of updating this was just too much. I spent a week or so migrating over to Doom Emacs and it's been fairly smooth sailing ever since.

• Qutebrowser: This is useful for doing very quick browsing (opening tabs quickly, searching quickly). However with the age of AI this need to do many rigorous internet searches has gotten less important. So I don't really use this all that often.

• Orgmode: My favorite way to take notes. If you're using Emacs, you really should be using Orgmode everywhere.

• TeX Live: I still use this for my resume, because of the things I can do with it. But also I'm just geeky and love to write code even for mundane things like resumes.

3 Elsewhere on the Web

• 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!

• 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.

• Git: Your Favorite Tool (July 2015) (Source)

  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!

• 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:

• LinkedIn

• GitHub (listx)

• Online Go Server (funloop)

• Reddit (listx)

Historical artifacts:

• Exercism (listx)

• DeviantArt (magic-byte)

• Twitter

• Wordpress (old blog)