2025: A Year of Settling In, Stepping Up, and Slowing Down

If 2024 was the warm-up lap, 2025 was the year everything finally came into alignment. Not in a dramatic, fireworks-in-the-sky sort of way, but in the steady, grown-up sense that the pieces I’ve been moving around for years finally decided to cooperate.

Stepping Into a New Role

The biggest milestone this year was taking on the role of COO of the Dallas Makerspace. I’ve been part of the community long enough to know its quirks, its strengths, and its potential, and stepping into a position where I can help steer its growth feels both natural and energizing.

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In case you misssed it, there’s been some intense community discussion around Minio (the popular S3-Compatible object storage server). It’s a perfect storm of a critical vulnerability, a sudden business model change, and a high-stakes standoff that puts Docker’s hub in a really shitty position.

What Happened?

The whole mess kicked off when a critical privilege escalation vulnerability, CVE-2024-40626, was disclosed. A patch for this nasty bug hit Minio’s source code around October 15th, but users quickly noticed the official minio/minio Docker image wasn’t being updated. This led to a GitHub issue being filed around October 18th, politely asking what was up. The answer was a bombshell: Minio had already made a business decision around October 10th to become a source-only distribution. They were abandoning their pre-compiled binaries (including the Docker image) and had even pulled their online documentation. As you’d expect, the community discussion exploded, both on GitHub and in a massive Hacker News thread around October 21st. To make a bad situation worse, when Docker’s own ’trusted images’ team tried to contact Minio, they were met with complete radio silence.

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I really want to think that I’m the type of child who benefitted the most with PBS:

I:

• Grew up in a small village under-served by traditional media.
• Attended public schools in the 87th poorest county in Ohio with books that were sometimes 30 years old (I had books in High School that my mom used.)
• Grew a love of math and Science from shows on PBS like Square One, which Mathnet helped me fall in love with Dragnet, NOVA, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego which taught me about geography.

Thinking about this more doesn’t make me want to put something on a pedestal…but it does make me feel like I’m not special, and that PBS did it’s job. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting – CPB – was dismantled today, unceremoniously. I hope and pray that one day, we can give kids a chance like I got to succeed.

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Personal note:

While I love volunteering and helping others, I choose to spend my time at organizations that I want to spend time at. I understand that there will always be politics in the things that are out there any time where you have a group of diverse minds with different goals, but, I always hope that the goals of the non-profit can come first: helping others learn, sharing our love of teaching with others, and helping other non-profits by providing resources and support so that they can perform their missions in the community.

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As most of you know, I’m a linux nerd. I do use some macOS and windows for my work life, but 99.9% of what I do is based off of Linux. With that said, while there are somewhat out of the box solutions for installing windows, there’s not really a piece of software that’s open source that’s out there that does everything that I want. Fog Project fits some pieces of the puzzle, netboot.xyz is really strong when it comes to Linux Management, but, doesn’t really give me any dashboard nor any way to really manage it outside of a docker container, which doesn’t really fit my workflow, and while there are OS specific solutions that are out there for Debian and RHEL, I’m looking for something that can automate a lot of the normal workflow specific things for me:

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