Salty Deprecated Software Engineer

The short version

I taught myself to code at 14 — QBasic on MS-DOS, on a virus-infested IBM 286 a church member donated to us. That turned into 25+ years of keeping other people's systems alive: laptop technician, system administrator, storage engineer, software engineer. Every few years the industry handed me something new — virtualization, the cloud, containers — and called my job obsolete. Mostly it just renamed it. AI is the latest rename, and this one is real enough that pretending otherwise would be malpractice.

The IT Hustle exists because the people who kept the old systems running deserve a straight answer about the new ones. Not vendor keynotes, not breathless newsletters — free tools with sysadmin instincts baked in, no login walls, no data sold. The same verify-before-you-trust habit I applied to servers, applied to agents, models, and the bills they generate.

Everything here maps the new world onto the one you already know: context windows are RAM, prompts are the CLI, agents are cron with ambition, and MCP is middleware. If you've kept other people's systems alive, you can run this.

What you can hold me to

• Every statistic carries a source or a 'last verified' date. If a number can't be verified, it doesn't ship.
• Titles state what the page does. No clickbait, no invented urgency.
• The salt is aimed at vendors, hype, and pricing pages — never at you.
• Tools stay free, client-side, and signup-free. Your data never leaves your browser.

When I get something wrong, it gets fixed and dated — see the corrections policy in the footer.

This byline is The IT Hustle's editorial pen name. Everything published under it is reviewed and approved by a human before it goes live. Full disclosure of how this site is produced is in the editorial policy.

Spotted an error, or want to argue about tape backups? Mail is open.