Well hello there! (That's GoodTimesWithScar-styled greetings on his YouTube channel for Star Wars fans IYKYK.) I am officially setting up shop in Leaflet, the Atmospheric way to write long-form content longer than on Bluesky (bet your fediverse instance have wild character limits than the defaults like tilde.zone's 5000 characters where I currently live in the other side). If you wondering why I am setting this publication for the new year of 2026, I need a way to keep doing the blog + writing thingy while patiently waiting for the data exports to be prepared by Nest admins after an abuse incident involving port scanning forcing to take a long break (even after Hetzner lifts the IP ban) so I can officially self-host it on my Dell PowerEdge T130 NixOS homelab server. More details in the sidenote below.
hackclub-alumni GitHub organization alongside the @hackclub-community/alumni GitLab SaaS subgroup, with a dedicated site in the planning stages behind the scenes).Sidenote: Hack Club, Nest [the tilde], and the Alumni Society
This is probably not my first rodeo on Leaflet if you are stalking my online activity lately. In fact, my first long-form content in the Atmosphere is when I did the launch post of Hack Club Alumni Society with the
Well hello there! post. But if you ask how I actually got joining Hack Club is through my researching sessions on finding a fiscal host for (and future projects) at GitHub Sponsors Docs and it happened during the Arcade days (its 2024 edition of the Summer of Making program).
If you are not in the Hack Club community (or need a refresher as an alum who moved on with life), it's a "loose association of Hack Clubbers graduated from high school and/or aged out of Hack Club's YSWS programs and events and run by alums for the alumni community (in short, not HQ-affliated project)" (emphasis mine). Technically I am responsible for coining the name Alumni Society (readers added context: I may borrowed the society naming format from The Financial Diet's membership program although it may be different from theirs because it covers the entire alumni community at Hack Club), alongside running the alums directory revamp and the online prescence outside Slack (aka running the account and administering hackclub-alumni GitHub organization alongside the @hackclub-community/alumni GitLab SaaS subgroup, with a dedicated site in the planning stages behind the scenes).
Alongside that Alumni Society stuff, there's Nest, a tilde server for Hack Clubbers based off Debian 13 with Nix installed for userspace package management (plus home-manager and friends). You may heard the news about the temporary suspension of its operations after multiple incidents of abuse and the ongoing growing pains, either in the Slack or at the Upptime-powered community infra monitoring issue tracker.
Without further ado, let me introduce myself for those new here or just need a refresher.
First stop: introductions, introductions, introductions
If you are new here or just spotted me at either Hack Club Slack or Gildedguy/Stellapent Cier Discord server or poking around Facebook friend suggestions and seeing my name there (as much as seeing both Michael Moy [a.k.a. Gildedguy the animator] in the past and Sedrik Dedman [a.k.a. Verplex the fox] lately, see screenshot below and alt text for context), waiting for my fingers to get slipped into sending that friend request as Meta is having field days shoveling salami like I'm Brennan Lee Mulligan's human furnance stomach), hello there! I am Andrei Jiroh from the Philippines. My pronouns are he/they, probably questioning for quite some time. Right now, I am college student by day and open-source dev at + and multifandom furry (silly) goober online at night. I am neurodivergent/disabled, specifically Autistic (with a official diagnosis in early childhood but traumatized anyway).
I'll going to do a longer introduction later, but nice to meet you, fellow stranger who's reading this! My special interests are backend dev in TypeScript, reading through specifications (i.e. Matrix portocol, ActivityPub, AT Proto) and technical docs (API docs, manpages, and the holy grail of all: Pro Git 2 book and Arch Wiki), electronic dance music and its subgenres (mostly dubstep, sythnwave, cyberpunk, among others), daily-driving Linux (specifically NixOS) and open-source apps/tools and going deep to the lore.
Reflecting the year that was
Going to say it's been a blast, sometimes wonky and others chaotic as hell. From the first months in college to having a field day with BNPL apps in the Philippines (in the works to taming the financial chaos behind the scenes, please do not ask for details) to officially onboarded as a "Iskolar ng Bayan" (aka local government-sponsored scholarship) in the municipality, it's a wild year for me. There might be times where things break and in the progress of fixing behind the scenes, but we still survived at last.
I also cooked some projects along the way and even started my self-hosting journey with and ntfy via . (hopefully the electric bills don't go bannas). I am still in the Hack Club community as an alum, goofing around, beta-testing projects others made and keeping up with the happenings. You do you.
Resolutions or theme of the year? Bingo cards!
Have you formed your bingo cards for 2026 yet? If you need ideas, here's mine to have a peak into:
For the theme of the year, it will be where self-hosting will happen, especially with the plans on self-hosting a fediverse instance and a PDS server at my homelab, powered by Cloudflare Tunnels (with some running at Uberspace and a few tildes around). More furry music on the radar, of course, alongside financial reworkings and inner autistic work behind the scenes. You know the drill.
See you on 2026!
I'll be signing off for now to celebrate with my family and recharge my spoons so I can go back into building and running projects and do life chores in between. My quest for this would be at least more long-form writings at the blog than the last year without burning out from the daily grindage at school, so wish me luck (and also advance happy 20th birthday to myself too)!
Until then, thanks for reading this blog post of time. See you again soon and take care. :3
Andrei Jiroh Halili (he/they) is an Autistic Filipino open-source developer and maintainer at + / and Batch 2025 (graduated from AFGBMTS on Computer Systems Servicing NC II under the Technical-Vocational-Livelihood track), multifandom furry goober listening to different subgenres of electronic dance music and currently taking BS in Information Technology at STI College Meycauayan based in Marilao, Bulacan, Philippines.
Love what you're reading? Follow him over at his socials (see his linktree page and all-the-links on his website) and chip in some at his tip jar to keep the lights running.