Hey, I’m James Andrews-Coulter. Australian technologist living in Europe. I've played a designer, developer, manager, founder, but all i really want to do is build machines that liberate humans (even if only myself). I'm known for: playing beach volleyball in snowtime, bikepacking with my beloved bodgy bike, and starting engineering projects i have no business starting.
[on machines for living] A seriously-minded architect…will find in a steamship his freedom from an age-long but contemptible enslavement to the past.
Something to aspire to. How much is what we’re building in 2026 “mere decoration” versus “freedom from our enslavement to the past”?
yesterday was full of learning. sharing some of them to appreciate my personal development.
ssh & ftp: two kinds of ways to manage a server’s file system. The former a cli experience and the latter more drag-and-drop.
static vs shared vs private: kinds of web hosts. static e.g cloudflare pages, good for serving a bunch of dumb, readymade html. shared, e.g. nearlyfreespeech.net, a fraction of a private server, good when you have something low powered but still dynamic like a cms. private e.g. hetzner, a full dedicated online computer, hood for when you have a suite of apps and services you need online.
nginx / apache: web server engines. like what docker is to an app, these are to a server.
Two years ago i was paying a freelancer to do these things for me.
AI reminding me the canonical web design books i read in my formative university years: Dont Make Me Think, A Book Apart, etc and now mourning their death on today’s vape-coded internet.
