About

My name is Sheldon Hearn.  I was born in 1974 in Cape Town, South Africa where I currently reside. Sort of. Close enough.

I’m an armchair anthropologist, husband, father of two and a compulsive smart-arse. I’m into camping, digital audio production, drumming, ontology, Linux, internetworking, popular physics, cosmogeny and any old kak that makes me think or laugh. Bonus points for making me think and laugh.

I’m a bit obsessive about gym. There’s nothing like tearing up a treadmill with a little SynSUN blowing your eardrums out.

Professionally, I’m an IT guy. That’s typically all I say about my work at dinner parties, but since you can stop reading any time… I specialize in the development, integration and management of internetworked systems based on open source software.

Currently, I’m employed as a platform engineer for a web hosting company. It’s not glamorous, but it’s comfortable, and occasionally even fun. Before that, I was a founding owner and technical director of an open source integration consultancy that leapt into bed with tenderpreneurs. Game over.

I’m also something of a drive-by open source contributor. When I had all the time in the world, I was a zealous FreeBSD committer. Subsequently, I’ve been a package maintainer for the Debian Linux and Gentoo Linux projects, and wrote the original friendly-fire avoidance code in UFO:AI. These days, I just contribute bug reports and patches to the projects I’m actively using, and then fade. I don’t really get affiliated.

Speaking of which, I’m a born-again athiest.

So, the blog. It’s like this. I like the sound of my own voice. Shameful, I know, but there it is. I enjoy talking and I enjoy reading what I write.

I went through a phase of blogging prolifically, but stalled for a couple of years because I couldn’t decide how to structure my tools and publishing channels, given that I:

• keep a classic “web log” of things I stumble upon, work-related and otherwise,
• jot down epiphanies, rants and raves, and
• occasionally write in depth technical articles.

Recently, it struck me how I’d fallen into the classic trap of “perfect is the enemy of good”. I couldn’t find a great publishing platform that perfectly supported all of my use cases and made it easy for people to subscribe for just the content of interest to them. And so I simply wasn’t producing anything.

So I’ve chosen a great publishing platform called Tumblr, and I’ll just wing it for now, and see whether it makes sense to keep the separate Google Reader feed for my work-related bookmarks. Or whatever.

You can reach me at <sheldonh@starjuice.net>. I have other addresses, but that one’s for life. My resume is available on request.

I hope this page finds you taking the actions you need to take to create the life you want to live. But in the immortal words of Van Wilder, Party Liason…

“You shouldn’t take life too seriously: you’ll never make it out alive”.

Live free or die. Oh, and never put jam on a magnet.