Despite — or perhaps thanks to — its distinctly nerdy appearance, this is a rigorous technical blog. It serves as a repository of notes, instructions, war stories, and assorted bits of arcane wisdom accumulated over my career as both a programmer and a Linux systems administrator.
As the background might suggest, these entries are not presented in dry bullet points or sterile checklists. Instead, they adopt a narrative style, drawing inspiration from a variety of sources. The title, as you may have guessed, nods to a certain television series named after another letter of the alphabet. The tone and structure of the more technical entries owe a considerable debt to Charles Stross’s brilliant Laundry Files novels — a fusion of bureaucratic horror, computational demonology, and British humour that feels strangely appropriate when dealing with enterprise-grade Linux clusters.
You’ll also find references to otherworldly deities and forbidden rituals. These are not borrowed wholesale from Lovecraft, but rather adapted from the cosmogonies my RPG groups and I have developed (or gleefully stolen) over the last four decades.
In addition to the technical content, there will likely be a more relaxed section featuring odd anecdotes, fictionalised encounters, and tributes to those unforgettable characters who haunt every IT department. Some are real, others are products of imagination, and all are seasoned with a dash of BOFH-style irreverence in the spirit of Simon Travaglia.
Whether you’re here for kernel tuning tips, eldritch documentation templates, or just a story about that one time the server tried to eat someone’s soul through systemd, you’re in the right place.1
Oh and in case you're wondering, the '90s look and feel is on purpose.
1 For those who are more pragmatic, or don't want to risk having their soul eaten by otherwordly horrors, here's a Layman Version of the docs.