artectrex

Hi!

My name is Matthieu and on the Internet I go by artectrex, I’m a Software Engineer, in my day job I work on things related to drones ;)

📚 I like reading high fantasy, and to a lesser extent science-fiction, but I also appreciate reading literary classics.

🎲 I like playing board games: Carcassonne, Catan, …

🕹️ In the few occasions I have some time to spare for gaming¹, I like to play Grand Strategy games like EU4, or sometimes RimWorld, Tropico, … I also like to play FOSS multiplayer games like Minetest, Teeworlds, etc with friends.

🚴 I like to go on big trips (1000-3000km each) on my bike, often with friends. I’ve done most of France in various directions, all around the island of Taiwan, Budapest to Copenhagen, Turin to Athens, and planning to discover more of Europe in the future.

🇪🇺 I’m a citizen of Europe. Our current institutions are not perfect (far from it!), but I believe in the European project.

Currently spending most of my time in Switzerland.

Free Software

Why Free Software? You can look at some of the essays on gnu.org, they are much better at explaining the philosophy behind it than I am.

Free and Open Source Software is necessary for a free society. This is something I’m utterly convinced of.

I’m involved in several FOSS projects, including but not limited to:

• PixelDroid, an Android client for Pixelfed
• (on deep freeze for now, never got very far with it. I hope I can change that at some point, please reach out if interested to help me) Cuttlefish, a GTK client for PeerTube that aims to also work on mobile form-factors like the PinePhone and Librem 5.

I got funding from NLnet for both Cuttlefish and PixelDroid.

Decentralization, self-hosting

Centralization is at the root of a lot of the perverse power dynamics that define the “mainstream” digital world, and even with free software behind it, centralized services inevitably give power to a limited group of individuals.

In the last few years a lot of good stuff has happened on this front: Mastodon and the fediverse in general (including PeerTube and Pixelfed) has become a viable alternative for a lot of us, Nextcloud has gotten more and more polished and awesome, Matrix is slowly but surely making progress…
Things are looking up for the federated internet!

To help make the Internet decentralized again, I self-host² the vast majority of my digital infrastructure, including but not limited to:

• A Nextcloud instance for myself and my immediate family
• A Jellyfin instance for myself, immediate family and my friends
• A Tiny Tiny RSS instance for myself and immediate family
• A Weblate instance for the translation of my FOSS projects
• A Quassel instance for IRC with reasonable UX

I use email on my own domains, hosted by a privacy-conscious hosting provider. Self-hosting that is possible but quite hard and easy to get wrong, but I might try it in the future.