I write and run systems software. I’m the author of OpenSMTPD, the mail server that ships in the OpenBSD base system, and CTO of Plakar, where I work on kloset, a content-addressable backup engine. poolp.org is where I write about what I build.
I also take short consulting engagements — architecture and code review, technical due diligence for funds and acquirers, mail infrastructure — through my practice, aljuna.tech. If you’ve read something here and want the same eyes on your system, that’s the door.
During the r2k12 hackathon in Paris, Marc Espie committed SQLite to OpenBSD’s base system.
This has the side effect that OpenSMTPD can start using it and while we agreed that we did not want it as a strong dependency, the various backends API allow us to make it a soft dependency that can be removed without breaking the daemon if someone really does not want SQLite linked.
It’s been a whiiiiiiile since my last OpenSMTPD related post. Time to break the slacking, blog-wise.
Unlike what would appear from the outside, there’s been a lot of activity, discussions and planning, I’ll address some here and will discuss it further soon.
Pitch, rhythm and harmony, from first principles.
Published December 2026.
About the book # Music theory is full of names, patterns and conventions, and most of us learn them as rules to memorize. This book works out where they come from.
