Spencer Pope

Welcome

Nice to e-meet you. I'm a programmer, freelancer, and traveler living in Shanghai. I'm not very public with this website, so nice work digging it up. I hope you enjoy your stay. I am very public, however, with most everything I do over at spenpo.com. So, that's a great place to keep up with me. I don't have much of a plan for this site yet. I'll just be writing freely and updating it at my leisure for now. I keep everything short and sweet at spenpo.com. It's information-dense, and I try not to waste anyone's time. I'm not going to do that here, and will just post whatever I feel like posting with links I think are helpful. It might be an introspection exercise or an affordable therapy alternative. I'll start by taking it as a chance to talk about anything I wouldn't consider relevant on spenpo.com. Again, thanks for being here.

Surface level

For a brief overview of me, head over to my About page. And, to read about what I'm working on right now, check out my Now page. I won't get into most of that stuff here. This home page will begin as a stream of consciousness that may or may not evolve into something structured. If you want something more definitely structured, you may enjoy my Work page, where I plan to start writing out my life story in the context of relevant things that I've done.

Is this necessary?

Since I've already mentioned my public website several times, you probably think it's dumb to have this one in addition to it. It is. This is not necessary whatsoever. I like that and will consider it like a toy. Like a fidget spinner. "Production level software" is so heavy and serious. I love that about software. It feels so official that starting a neat project on your laptop can easily be disguised as a full-time job. That has helped me create a prosperous working relationship with myself which I'm grateful for. Setting goals feels very real in this line of work even though no one will know I hit them unless I tell them. These have been some of my guiding forces in cultivating productivity and achieving personal and professional goals. As you can tell, that was all positive, it's just not always necessary. I'm interested in developing this site as a thing that is not urgent. Not even as "a project", just a thing. If there were an NBA player who played pickup in a quiet neighborhood once in a while just because they felt like it, that would sort of rhyme with what I'm going for here.

This site was born

This page was served to you by a Virtual Private Server (VPS) that I use for a few things. It hosts a calendar/contacts server, a mail server, and an web server, which is the thing that fed this delicious web page to your browser. I think this is relevant because it tells you a little bit about me. Sometime in 2022, I listened to this episode of The Tim Ferriss Show where Derek Sivers takes a few minutes to explain his fascinating "tech independence" philosophy. I don't know what exactly to call Derek, as he is many things, but it is clear from listening to him speak that he is brilliant. Tech Independence is the choice to run your personal file management solutions on computers that you control as an alternative to cloud-based solutions. I took the first step toward getting my life out of the cloud by following Derek's blog post step by step. The process leverages a shell script that he wrote as a one-stop solution for the ABCs of Tech Independence. Finishing the post will leave you with a VPS that knows all the tricks you'll ever need to teach it to manage your digital self without Apple, Google, or anyone else's help. It sets up an SMTP server to replace Gmail, a DAV server to store your contacts and calendar events, and block storage for the rest of your files. It also runs an web server that will process requests from browser clients. Assuming you're reading this page on a browser, that web server is the application your computer is using to talk to my VPS. So, pursuing Tech Independence landed me with this elegant website and an exciting new artifact of my life. Not bad.