Moin!¹

You either plan to retire as a manager or live long enough to see yourself becoming a grey bearded Windows-dismissing Unix guy

I’m Joerg Moellenkamp. Well, to be exact: I’m Jörg Möllenkamp. But I try to be 7-bit safe. Quite often even when I’m writing by hand. I have a love-hate relationship with diacritic marks. Love … because they are obviously part of my name. Hate … because I tend to forget them.

I’ve been working with computers as long as I can think. And I have earned money with computers as long as I can think of, too. Starting with 20 german marks to fix an AUTOEXEC.BAT on the computer of a local paint shop back when I was 14.

I connected a student dormitory to the internet with 2MBit/s WLAN with directed antennas when WLAN wasn’t a big thing. I helped create an ISP in Northern Germany. I developed an image archive system for a newspaper. I was the service infrastructure senior director at a startup, building data centres on three continents (The datacenters were in Singapore, Boston …. and Oldenburg, a rather small city in the northwest of Germany, yeah I know).

Worked at Sun Microsystems. At the end I was a Principal Field Technologist (formerly known as Principal Engineer) at Sun. Got acquired by Oracle. Currently working there as a Master Principal Solutions Engineer. I’ve been at Oracle much longer than I ever was at Sun by now. Was a part of the Oracle Elite Engineering Exchange. Since last year I’m a certified Information Security Officer.

I did many projects I’m still proud of at both companies. Projects that touch the lives of many people.²

I’m the author of the “Less Known Solaris Features” ebook. I’m the principal author of the “Solaris Cheatsheet”.

I’m living in Lueneburg³. I’m an enthusiastic traveller. I’m an avid road cyclist.⁴ I’m a vegan without proselytising intent. I’m the annoying guy asking for an oat-milk decaffeinated salted⁵ caramel latte macchiato but with a good reason for the former two and an acquired taste for the last. I had no heartbeat for 154 minutes. I’m the son of the best parents on this planet⁶. I’m the older brother of 5 brothers and sisters. I’m an atheist. I’m a mask-wearing, vaccine-wanting, distance-keeping sleep sheep. I’m a fan of California and San Francisco⁷. I’m a frequent flyer afraid of flying.

I’m a sometimes grey bearded but always Windows-dismissing Unix guy.

About the blog

Dies ist mein Blog. Es gibt viele Blogs. Aber dieses ist meins.

I’ve been blogging since July 15, 2004. Actually, even before that. In 2000, at my job at the time, I maintained an internal documentation that was essentially a blog. But that was internal, so it doesn’t count. Since then, it has always been part of my life. I’ve met many interesting people through it. Even though it no longer has the pull for readers that it once had, it’s still very important to me. I neglected it for a while — a very blunt person once told me I had left my baby in the gutter. She was right. Since then, I’ve tried to always keep it in a state that does justice to the many years of work that have gone into it.

There are always phases where I write a lot, just as there are phases where life takes away the time for it. 2026, for example, is a time when I write at night, when I can’t sleep. It may be that when sleep returns, things will get a bit quieter here.

I write about whatever I want here. Solaris is still a very important topic for me. But other topics matter to me just as much. I write for the joy of writing. I write for the focus that writing gives me. I don’t write to make money, I don’t write for page impressions or any other metric. I simply enjoy writing.

There is only one prime directive here: I write about myself, never about others. Respect for privacy demands it. Unless someone has explicitly given me permission to write about them, I write about them here only in very veiled terms, at most. Just because I bare myself here at times doesn’t mean I have to rip the clothes off other people too.

The decision against using one of the platforms is a deliberate one. I don’t want to submit to the pressures of the attention economy. I want my texts to live on infrastructure that is mine. I want to be able to take them somewhere else at any time. I want everything that one could, in the broadest sense and with some goodwill, call creative to be in one place. My place.

Social networks

Just because I forgo the platforms for my blog doesn’t mean I don’t use them. If you really want to know what I’m currently doing there, you should probably follow me on one of the social networks:

I don’t use Twitter anymore out of obvious reason. Even the password change feels like a trip to the fusion reactor on LV246. Instead of this i’m using norden.social as part of the Fediverse. I think I’m on Facebook since 2007 but i’m just using it to announce new blog entries. To brag about my career (and for me to read fortune cookie wisdoms and rare pearls) i’m on Xing and LinkedIn. As nothing has really happened that’s not on Strava, i’m obviously using it for my bike rides. If i have fallen from my bike and you find me: Please pause Strava! Then call the ambulance. At last, there is some code i’ve developed over time available at Github. I’m on a few additional social networks, but I’m not really using them any longer.

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