About me - web developer, programmer, sysadmin

About me - web developer, programmer, sysadmin

I don’t really like talking about myself, especially to an audience I don’t know. The best way I can probably describe myself is to create a list of things I am:

  • My name is Ralph Slooten, aka “Axllent” on Github, forums etc.
  • I am a technical lead & full stack website developer at two companies in New Zealand, Techno Joy and Springtimesoft.
  • I love Linux! I started using Linux in 1998 after countless problems with my Windows installation. By coincidence I walked past a bookstore which was selling Redhat 6.0, and after about 8 seconds I bought it, and raced home to install it. This is where my whole Linux journey began. Since then I have used Debian, Mandrake, SuSE and Gentoo, Alpine & Ubuntu.
  • I love open source, and spent much of my time developing useful tools and sharing those with the world. You can see some of my projects & code here.
  • Most of my development time is spent working with PHP (mainly Silverstripe), JavaScript, MySQL & Go, plus of course system administration, server infrastructure, continuous integration (CI), docker etc.
  • I have lived in Africa, Europe and New Zealand.
  • My hobbies consist of computers, programming, music & movies.
  • I am a Rotarian and a Paul Harris Fellow recipient.
  • I hate politics. I really do.

About this site

I started this site many years ago as a working experiment for my hobby (website development) - and not much has changed in that regard, other than the fact that I have been building websites professionally since about 2006 (my hobby became my work). I used to write quite a few tutorials, especially about Linux, back when Linux was much less user friendly. Those times have changed, and many of those tutorials became irrelevant, so I only kept the ones I thought may be useful and every now and then I add something new.

This site has over the years transitioned from plain PHP/CSS, to MediaWiki, to a custom CMS, to Silverstripe, and currently built with Hugo. It uses a fair amount of Vue.js, Bootstrap 5, and includes some additional JavaScript libraries such as fuse.js for the awesome site search.