"Linux Prepper" was a pretty mellow chat room I discovered back when I was listening to Jupiter Broadcasting and noticed it mentioned on a 2020 episode, Cabin Fever, of Linux Unplugged. I also liked the prompt:
- Be prepared in layers
- What if your cloud goes out? Your system goes out?
- What do you do when you want to bug out?
After receiving JB's blessing I adopted the name for this show... but my desire to have the show be exactly a certain way meant it didn't actually get made for years. At the time I'd been helping maintain community infrastructure for Noisebridge Hackerspace, as a place to play around with tooling and software with others. This went much better than I had anticipated by raising the funds for renting servers + asking a person to donate a domain, but when I decided to leave the space to focus on volunteering with NextcloudPi and others services, plus life itself, I realized there was no actual point person to take over the reigns for me. I just had to leave the entire project, though it was fun, to potentially die on the vine.
Despite dozens of volunteers over multiple years, no specific volunteers actually wanted to take over... and the system at that time was separate from Noisebridge's primary infrastructure by design. A sandbox which had seen far more adoption than anticipated... but still was not actually controlled by Noisebridge completely... the domain was privately held... the volunteers came and went... and no one could actually force these things to change.
So, I experienced that loss-- the reality is a service will eventually go offline, get overwritten or just ignored. How do you deal with that? I was working as a documentation lead and community spokesperson for NextcloudPi, but what do you do when your NextcloudPi goes offline? Why run Nextcloud when a shared network directory was even easier to setup at thome? What if I never wanted to share my data with others to begin with?
These experiences aligned with my thinking on the sorts of content now present on the Linux Prepper podcast. Over a couple years of planning and releasing no official content, I got to meet several podcast hosts and realized I should take that next step into the unknown. Thankfully I had customized tools like Discourse extensively for Noisebridge, so I ended up being an admin for https://help.nextcloud.com in order to better align Nextcloud's forum with NextcloudPi's community, because attempting to handle support questions in real-time chat was not helpful. Thankfully, discourse remains a great place to focus NextcloudPi support questions and community maintained documentation.
In 2023 at the Nextcloud conference in Berlin I gave a panel discussion on How to Contribute as well as a lightning talk about how You can Contribute to Open Source, starting from being the listener of a podcast.
These experiences, along with volunteering for hackerspaces, Discourse and Nextcloud, made me realize that I simply have to proceed from where I'm at right now instead of where I want myself to be. This concept has become core to the show itself.
Last year at Linuxfest Northwest I was on Linux Unplugged to give my trivia challenge. You can listen to the episode 25 Years of LinuxfestNorthwest by clicking here. It was a nice full circle moment.
If you read this far, have a great day and thanks for your interest in Linux Prepper podcast.