I first used Linux when I was 13-14. Like many nerdy teens, I went through a cavalcade of distros: Red Hat, Fedora Core (2), Slackware, Debian, SUSE, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Arch. I’m probably missing one or two.

But there was another. Not Linux. FreeBSD.

The BSDs are weird. They’re older than Linux. They are closer to UNIX than is Linux. They have much the same userland as Linux. But they are decidedly not Linux.

I first tried FreeBSD around 2004. I had a brand-new Athlon64 3200+. Windows didn’t have a 64-bit version yet, and I was itching to take advantage of the extra bits (not understanding they didn’t mean much for performance). Enter FreeBSD.

It was actually a failure, thanks (of course) to driver issues. A generous (not to mention patient) user on Freenode spent hours teaching me how to build a new kernel. That was my first introduction to vi (not vim; the default FreeBSD install didn’t and still doesn’t come with something as new as a 1991 text editor). And after hours of work, we learned that the FreeBSD Radeon drivers just didn’t compile on amd64, so I couldn’t have hardware acceleration. I wiped the install.

(Looking back, I don’t know why this was so important to me. It might have just been the principle of the matter.)

Spoiler: I came back.

I’m not here to convince you to install FreeBSD, so I’ll just say this: FreeBSD, like OpenBSD, NetBSD, etc. is very much an operating system, not a distro, and that shows itself in subtle ways. Look no further than the handbook to see what I mean.

Railway is a great service. I’ve been using it for ~2 years now. It’s got a clean interface, good performance, and possibly the best hosted Postgres prices in the business.

But it’s not without quirks. Railway instances share resources, such as compute time, memory, and IP. This is standard in the PaaS industry, but for Discord bots, it kind of sucks.

Discord bans IPs of bots that violate the terms of service. On a service like Railway, you might share the same IP with multiple Discord bots. If one of them is a bad actor, then Discord kicks them all offline.

(Thankfully, this only happens a few times a year in practice, and fixing it is just a button click in the dashboard.)

More, while Railway is a good price, they still need to make money. But when you could run most Discord bots on a Raspberry Pi, why spend $35/mo?

We can do cheaper.

Though Railway wasn’t affected, the October 2025 AWS outage had me missing the days of self-hosting. When I was a teen, I’d run *nix boxen in my bedroom, wrestle with WiFi, wrestle with ATI drivers, and marvel that Doom 3 ran natively.

That’s two reasons to switch. I don’t need a third. It’s time to go back.

I’m tiltowait. I run a few popular Discord bots for World of Darkness (and more specifically Vampire: The Masquerade) games. Though the tech world is replete with stories like mine, it still surprises me that I’m only in my current career because I got annoyed typing out dice rolls on my phone.

This site will be a journal of dev notes, stories, etc. Almost entirely for myself and my own edification, but I need to store it somewhere, and if even one person finds it useful, interesting, or informative, why not here?