1stvamp.org
Wes Mason speaking at a conference

About

Hi, I'm Wes Mason (aka 1stvamp).

Software engineer who drifted into platform and infrastructure work (and never quite drifted back out). Twenty years of programming, fifteen of them fully remote, with stops along the way at Canonical, npm and Elastic. What I like best is the platform side of things: the internal tools, paved paths and plumbing that make everyone else's day a little less annoying.

Open source runs through most of what I do and care about, along with the open web and small tools that reduce a workflow down to a vim → git problem and nothing more.

I've given talks and workshops at conferences and user groups over the years, and turned up on the odd podcast, usually about software distribution, supply chains, or on-call that doesn't make people miserable.

I've been putting things on the internet since 1999. Before the infrastructure years I ran an IRC network for the better part of a decade, which turned out to be an excellent way to learn how both systems and people break.

This site collects posts from 2009 to 2014, plus a preserved archive of short "thoughts" from 2002 to 2008, over 500 in total (I blog in fits and starts, but I'm bad at throwing things away). These days I'm into Python, Rust, DevOps, distributed systems, and whatever's caught my attention this week.

Past lives

Wes in 7th Doctor cosplay, peeking out of a TARDIS

In assorted previous lives I ran the PHP Weekly newsletter, organised the Leeds2600 hacker meetup, reviewed gadgets and games freelance for UGeek/Geek.com, and created, sold and promoted both a webcomic and an actual dead-tree comic book.

Open source

A few things I maintain, or have otherwise inflicted on the world:

  • sidenotes: a Ruby gem for annotating Rails models with their schema.
  • query-ts: a small Python CLI for the Tailscale API.
  • conn-check: post-deploy connection verification, born at Canonical and still in use there.
  • trestus: a status page generator using Trello as a backend, also born at Canonical.
  • trequests: a Tornado async HTTP/HTTPS adaptor for python-requests.
  • hippybot: a Hipchat bot in Python with a simple plugin API.
  • django-form-scaffold: helpers for scaffolding Django form templates.

Find me

I'm always happy to talk shop, so the best places to reach me are:

GPG

Public key available at /gpg/.