I'm most thankful for the fact that Open Source has given me a relatively successful career for the past 30 years. I always see people disparage OSS saying there is no way to make money from it. I'm not rich, but I can (and do) pick and choose my gigs without sweating the gaps in between nowadays. And 90% of the gigs I do today are by word of mouth alone. Thankfully, because I got way too lazy about my website and I haven't updated my CV in a decade. There is a lot of money to be made in Open Source, but only if you are willing to find (and add to) the value in it. OSS allows me to live in my comfort zone. And besides my career, damn near everything technical in my home is connected in some way or other to OSS. I'm glad the commercial technology is catching up so I don't have to work as hard to build everything from scratch. OSS has been my life blood, and I think it has a whole lot more to show yet before there's any actual threat of it fizzling out.

I would have had to stick to my original dream career (guitar god!) if Open Source didn't happen. But then I'd have to redefine "comfort zone" to something that isn't exactly comfortable.

Latest command line tools I learned to love: ripgrep over grep and fd over find

Latest hardware: Raspberry Pi Zero W for tinkering. To me it is crazy what they have achieved with those little computers and how it can be used for education.

Linux & open source & commodity HW

All open source ones.

Emacs

high bandwidth infrastructure