By Asheesh Laroia - 07 Jan 2015
I’m Asheesh Laroia, and I’m excited to say I’m joining Sandstorm as a member of the technical staff.
For most of my career, I’ve worked in open source: I’ve been a software engineer at Creative Commons, and I co-founded OpenHatch, a non-profit that helps people get involved in open source. I got my start in open source by reporting a bug against a Linux filesystem check tool, made my first visible contribution in 2003 when I created the Xbox-Linux wiki, and I mentor others as a Developer in Debian. I did a one-year stint in web startup-land to hone my security knowledge, and now I find myself in the coolest possible position: working at Sandstorm on tools and community to build the easiest, most secure system ever to run a personal server.
Personal servers mean a lot to me. I’ve been running one since 2001; in 2006, I found a way to move it out of my parents’ basement into friend’s apartment in Tokyo (that’s another story). I’ve been through it all – RAID failures, difficult package upgrades, and getting compromised – for the pride of knowing I’m running my own real Internet site, so it’s amazing to be working on Sandstorm’s mission of creating the easiest way to run a personal server.
I first heard about Sandstorm when Kenton visited San Francisco to discuss it with me and get my feedback. We talked about about what Sandstorm can learn from efforts like Freedombox, and I was impressed to discover that the Sandstorm vision seemed to be ahead of my own thinking. So last summer, I came to the Sandstorm Hackathon (app port-a-thon), and rather than port an app, I added a Vagrantfile to make it easier to port apps to Sandstorm from a Mac. You might have seen me talk about it in the video for the Indiegogo campaign.
Sandstorm’s mission has two pillars: the codebase, and the community, and I’m lucky to be working on both. As my first act, I’ve given us an IRC channel. Come find me in #sandstorm on freenode as “paulproteus” – ping me about parts that need improvement, or about how to get involved. If you already have a client, great – join in! And if you don’t, visit us via this web chat link and say hello! I’m looking forward to meeting all of you.