John Crenshaw

I built other people's software for a living. Now I build my own.

Retinal biometric access control for DoD facilities, and the EPROM tooling that went with it, written against Intel silicon before that silicon shipped. A COBOL trading system moved off an IBM System/36 to C# with Y2K closing in and a deadline that physically could not move. A distributed compute grid stitched together out of idle office PCs, mining subrogation cases by the thousands every day under HIPAA. Then a decade of SMS delivery over SMPP at platform scale, multithreaded, self-healing off its own telemetry, rolling out across every availability zone. Backend and security back when that was the job.

I retired in April 2024 and I did not stop writing code, I just stopped writing it for other people. What I pick now is Rust, on an Arch box I built up by hand pulling the CachyOS repos and the linux-zen kernel, under Hyprland with the Noctalia shell stretched across an ultrawide. My tools, my choices, nothing on it I did not put there myself. The things I build are on the shelf at crenshawdev, and they exist because I wanted them to exist. Nobody is clamoring for them.

Gay, AIDS-era survivor, married. Home runs on one headless laptop with the lid shut, Proxmox and a stack of unprivileged containers, Technitium handling DNS and DHCP for the house, and every device that phones home penned into its own VLAN where it cannot see the machines that actually matter. When it goes sideways at 2am the person who fixes it is me, which is the entire point.

This forge is the same argument. My own git host instead of somebody's platform waiting to change the terms out from under me. I trust ports I closed and code I read.

The rest is at jcrenshaw.dev.