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Systems administrator, software developer, and technical writer.
In September 2018, my book “Bash Quick Start Guide” was published with Packt Publishing. It’s a crash course in writing and reading Bash and POSIX‐fearing shell script in general. The aim of the book is to demystify shell and make it pleasant and expressive to write.
> This was the only book I could find that lays out best practises for bash scripting, such as proper quoting, variable naming, and parameter expansion. There are many books that will show you a lot of interesting script examples but they’ll also teach you bad habits that might get you into trouble down the road. This would be a great first book for anyone looking to write safe, portable scripts. Highly recommended!
—Amazon.com user “Kinger”
> definitely the bash book I was looking for 15 years ago
—Nick Jensen
Reference: Ryder, Tom. Bash Quick Start Guide. Birmingham: Packt Publishing, Limited, 2018. Print. ISBN: 978-1-78953-883-0
In February 2016, the second edition of my book *Nagios Core Administration Cookbook* was published with Packt Publishing. It explains how to set up Nagios Core to solve various monitoring problems.
> I wish I had this book over a year and a half ago when I first started learning about this software. The topics are extremely easy to follow and start from the very basics to advanced topics including redundant servers and monitoring Nagios’ own performance.
—Richard J. Breiten
> This book covers every corner of Nagios Core needed for a healthy setup. If this is your first time using Nagios Core, this is the book for you. Even if you have a working environment, this is a great resource to verify best practices are being followed—in terms of both security and usability.”
—Amazon.com user “Andrew”
Reference: Ryder, Tom. Nagios Core Administration Cookbook ‐ Second Edition. Birmingham: Packt Publishing, Limited, 2016. Print. ISBN: 978-1-78588-933-2
I maintain a blog called “Arabesque”, with posts mostly about Unix command line tools. There are reader translations and e-book compilations of many of the articles around the web. Posts have featured in magazines such as “BSD Magazine” and “Hacker Monthly“.
Some popular articles:
I’ve contributed articles for the Vim enthusiasts’ website “Vimways”:
I’m particularly interested in C, Perl, Python, and Unix shell script programming, especially for the purposes of automation, reporting, and monitoring.
I write a lot of Perl. I am TEJR on CPAN, and have a blog on blogs.perl.org.
I also write a lot of PHP and JavaScript; I started my technical career as a web developer, but most of my web development is for internal tools now. I’m comfortable adapting to whatever stack is needed for a given project.
I write a lot of Nagios monitoring plugins. I publish some of them as user tejr on Nagios Exchange.
I also write a fair bit of Vim script for the text editor Vim, mostly just for fun; I publish plugins, filetype plugins, and colour schemes as tejr on vim.org.
I publish my code on my cgit instance.
Here’s a list of some of the more interesting/useful/complete projects:
Scripts and configuration files for Unix‐like systems.
Find duplicate files efficiently using Perl core modules.
Plugin for Nagios/Icinga to perform multiple NRPE checks and return a status based on the aggregated results.
Plugin for Nagios/Icinga to check whether a specified Ookla Speedtest server is in the public server list.
Brick‐stupid wrapper around Unix crypt(3) for quick prototyping on the command line.
Perl module to copy a list into named sub‐lists depending on test outcomes; an expressive shortcut for multiple named calls to the «grep» builtin.
Perl module with an experimental command wrapper to sign, encrypt, and mail command output and errors. Previously named croncrypt.
Perl module to manage timed lyrics in LRC format.
Shell scripts for command‐line interaction with a Nagios server via Checkmk Livestatus to save the hassle of using the CGI scripts.
Shell script wrapper for tasks to send appropriate passive Nagios service checks using the NSCA client.
Shell script for easy use of the ndiff(1) program included with the Nmap suite.
Shell script daemon to refresh a GnuPG public keyring slowly, in random order, with random waits between each refresh, looping indefinitely.
Find and play media from your collection in your shell, based on a lazy keyword search wrapper around find(1).
Persistent SSH daemon setup for Debian‐like systems using start-stop-daemon(8).
Various customisations for the text editor Vim, including colour schemes, plugins, and enhanced filetype support.
Keep track of new remote tags for local repositories.
Little tool in C to print hex octets of UTF-8 strings to show how the characters in them are encoded.
I have most experience on Debian GNU/Linux and its ilk, but can work on pretty much any Unix‐like operating system. I’m also fond of OpenBSD.
I’ve made some presentations to the Palmerston North Linux Users Group, for which I act as Secretary. PDF slides from my presentations are available for download here.
The February 2017 issue of “BSD Magazine” includes an interview with me, to accompany an article from my blog “Arabesque”. The interview content without a paywall is available here courtesy of the editor.
There’s also an email interview with me from 2015 about text editor usage patterns on “How I Vim”.
I was cited in the journal “Nature”, in an article titled “Five reasons why researchers should learn to love the command line”, by Jeffrey M. Perkel.
Interests
I’m a self‐taught musician. I only really mess about with it, but I have a great time doing so. I like using Ardour, a digital audio workstation.
I dabble in poetry, mostly recreationally with a small group of local writers.
I really like foreign languages, although I only speak English with any fluency. My best second language is French, but I’m still intermediate at best even in that. In the last few years I’ve enjoyed travelling to Europe when I have the means; the last time (February 2024) was for FOSDEM.
I’m a fully‐licensed “ham” (amateur radio operator) since November 2023. My callsign is ZL2EJ.
I enjoy craft beer, particularly New England IPAs (“hazies”).
I enjoy table‐top role‐playing games (think: Dungeons and Dragons).
I have been a Free Software Foundation Associate Member (#439443) since July 2013.
Last updated: Tue, 18 Jan 2022 04:15:12 +0000
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