About

Hello! My name is Siddharth Kannan. I work as a Site Reliability Engineer. I have been living in Tokyo, Japan since October 2018. This is my blog, and I have been writing posts here since 2014. I write primarily about the books I read, the music I listen to, and the code I write in my free time. I have also written sporadically about the Internet and the ways in which products online attempt to keep their users engaged through recommendation systems that peddle salacious content.

I wrote on various bloging platforms before settling on this page.

I love Golang and Docker, and I package all my personal deployments into a Docker container. I use Bash, along with tools such as awk and sed, for most of my scripting needs. I have worked extensively with PHP and MySQL while working on a LAMP stack application at work. I use Nginx as the reverse proxy for applications running on my cloud VMs.

My computer is running the latest version of Debian with GNOME and i3 as window managers. I switched to Debian relatively recently, after years of using Ubuntu, to get away from the increasing bloatware in that distribution. I love tiling window managers in general and i3 in particular; however, I have kept Gnome around as a replacement for workflows that I have not yet mastered on i3.1

Firefox, tmux, git, and Emacs are the major parts of my daily setup. I switched from Vim to Emacs 4 years ago and it has been the most rewarding tooling change for me. I use Org mode and org-roam for note taking at home and at work. I use Wireguard for self-managed VPN instances, as well as for a private network, where I have deployed applications such as Miniflux (RSS feed reader) and Shiori (bookmark manager).

I play a few games (semi-regularly) on an old Playstation 4. The list includes Fortnite, Last of Us and Civilization 6. I highly recommend Civilization 6 to anyone who likes to read history. I am constantly amazed by the performance that the PS4 can deliver nearly 8 years after its original release.

You can check out some of my open-source projects on GitHub.

If you want to contact me, you can send an e-mail to mail [at] siddharthkannan [dot] in.


Last updated: 2024-09-16

  1. Now, this includes audio and bluetooth devices, both of which seem to have spotty support despite PulseAudio / Pipewire and applications like Blueman.