It’s generally impossible to only use services, private or government, that perfectly align with one’s values, so one must opt to choose one’s battles. The controversy over GitHub’s contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the latest such battle in the open-source software world. GitHub employees and users are trying to pressure GitHub to drop the contract, as a way to place greater pressure on ICE and the U.S. government to curtail crimes and human rights abuses.
A letter to GitHub signed by many open-source maintainers has raised the profile of this campaign. It stops short of calling for users to abandon GitHub, but many users concerned about this issue are searching for alternatives and considering how much they are locked in to GitHub’s ecosystem. I realize that I’m fairly locked in myself, in both personal and professional projects. While I’m not prepared to leave GitHub entirely, I wanted to see how hard it would be to set up a system where I have greater control. So here is documentation of setting up a git hosting service with using Gitea and nearlyfreespeech.net.
I’m recruiting a Research Software Engineer to join my team at EcoHealth Alliance in New York. Details and how to apply can be found at https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/career/research-software-engineer.
For me, the task of building a personal website is fraught with so many of my technical, aesthetic, and personal hangups that I hadn’t updated mine since mid-graduate school. Thanks to consistent pestering by Maëlle, though, I finally got around to re-building this one using a modern toolkit. Hopefully I can keep it up to date.
Here are some of the pieces that I used to build it: