red shirt jeff

An ode to the homelabber:

As a software developer, I never was a true sysadmin. I never pulled a server to replace a failed drive at 3 a.m. I never got to roll my little maintenance cart through a cold aisle, with hearing protection to keep my fragile eardrums from rupturing amidst a sea of 100+ dB screaming server fans...

That is, until I built my homelab. Now I can act like a sysadmin as I make sure my kids never have a moment of downtime while they're streaming their favorite episode of Odd Squad.

Like my last new shirt (It was DNS, I figured I'd mention my latest shirt design here on the blog in case you're interested:

As a parent of four, I thought it would be especially fitting on a onesie, therefore in addition to two 'normal' shirt options, there's a version for your baby (this version is out of print for now... let me know in the comments if you'd like to see it again!):

I forgot to mention it on my blog, but my latest T-shirt design has been wildly popular... mostly because it's almost always true:

You can buy the 'It was DNS' T-shirt on RedShirtJeff.com.

In 2020, I got serious about my YouTube channel after seeing explosive growth from a series on the Turing Pi Raspberry Pi cluster. Early in 2021, the success of my books and the YouTube channel resulted in me quitting my last paid consulting gig, and focusing all my time on Hosted Apache Solr, writing, and making videos.

In 2021 the channel went from just under 100,000 subscribers to 253,000 (and counting!):

Video views went from about 6 million to 21 million, as a few of my Raspberry Pi-related videos took off (though I wouldn't consider any of my videos 'viral'—most get a slow 'wave' of growth if they get popular).

It makes me throw up a little in my mouth to say this, because it's such a YouTuber thing to do... but I now have an official merch store to go along with my YouTube channel:

The Red Shirt Jeff store has original designs that I find interesting or funny, and there are three shirt designs available at launch:

• It has been 0 days since I recompiled the Linux kernel (also available in a Women's version).
• Release the Magic Smoke
• Hard Drive & RAID-Z2