Jordan Bancino

Hello, I'm Jordan Bancino, and this is my personal website. Here is just a little bit about who I am, in the order of importance to me.

Christian: I wish to honor God and make His name known in a manner that is civil, logical, and respectful. I follow the Bible as it is written, and strive to not read into it or take it out of context. I believe in peace, the sanctity of human life, and freedom. I believe that all lives matter, completely independent of age, background, or race because those things don't define a person. I consider myself a deeply philosophical and religious person, with a great interest in metaphysics and theology.

Fiancé: I thoroughly enjoy spending time with my fiancée. Together, we go kayaking and hiking, among many other outdoor activities.

Programmer: Over the course of my programming career, I've learned many languages, ranging from MIPS assembly to JavaScript. Right now, I spend most of my personal time in C, but for work I write PHP. C is my favorite language though, because it is the standard for interfacing with computers. Contrary to popular belief, C truly is the most portable programming language, because almost all operating systems and CPUs have a compiler for it. A platform can hardly be considered such unless it has a C compiler.

Digital Minimalist: The way most people use computers and software is rather flawed. This is partially because the software we use is so bloated. I am a firm believer in using simple software, because I write software. I believe everyone should have a deeper knowledge of how their computers and phones work, so I choose to use software that is very simple, which allows me to understand how things work. Often, this means using software that is very old and requires a lot of work to make useful. That is just the way I like it. It forces me to be intentional with the way I use computers. I do most of my work in a text-based terminal. It is a lot harder to get distracted and I find myself to be more productive that way.

Digital Privacy Advocate: I believe that there's no other way to go about computing than open-source, self-hosting, and encryption. I don't store any data in the cloud; I run my own server and network infrastructure because I'm very concerned about privacy in the digital world. I disapprove of the direction that big tech companies are going with user privacy. I don't depend on proprietary software or services; anything I need that is mission-critical is open-source and self-hosted.

OpenBSD User: I run OpenBSD on all my personal computers and servers because it is minimal and secure, yet functional. Whenever possible, I try to stick to software that is built into the OpenBSD base system, and I only install packages that have a minimal number of dependencies. I have an extensive background in other UNIX-like operating systems as well, including Linux.

Cellist: In high school, I played in many orchestras. Now, at the university, I am studying cello as a music minor.

Contact Me

I prefer simplicity and security, even if that means I'm a little more difficult to reach than most people. I don't use any external sites if I don't absolutely have to. I don't use social media and I don't have a personal Google account.

That all being said, I'm not anti-social! You are more than welcome to reach out to me using Matrix. My Matrix ID is:

@jordan:bancino.net

Unfamiliar with Matrix? Check out my Matrix Welcome Guide. In short, Matrix is far more secure than email, and is much easier to self-host due to the fact that email has been largely monopolized by big tech companies, and those companies make it very difficult for small users like to me to get email through reliably. Matrix is also a lot more user-friendly than plain-text email. I found that plain-text email was actually quite a big problem for a lot of people, so Matrix allows all of the things that plain-text email does not. For more information, read my blog post: Why I Switched To Matrix.

I have very few online accounts. If you find an account that claims to be me on a social media network, it probably is not actually me.

Projects

In my spare time, I work on a few side projects. Some are programming projects, including simple programs and libraries. Others involve automating tasks I perform frequently. I also do a lot of writing, although not all of my writing is public. Over the years, I've written a lot of stuff.

Current

I think these are the projects I'm currently working on. I dabble in a lot of things these days, so it is hard to keep track.

My Blog, though it's not as active as I'd like.
Telodendria: A Matrix Homeserver written in ANSI C
An interactive map that showcasese historical sites. This isn't public yet, but when it is, I'll link to it here.

You can find a few of my previous projects here. You can safely assume that anything not mentioned in the previous section is totally dead, mostly because I've moved on to other stuff and there was never a need for it. However, if you have interest in an old project of mine, don't hesitate to reach out! I'll probably be excited to give some pointers on usage and development at the very least.

Here's a few old projects of mine that I was particularly proud of at the time, and, in hindsight, still am proud of, although they're no longer maintained.

SwerveIO, an open source swerve drive library written in Java for FRC. It focused on correctness, portability, and modularity, and is still by far the best swerve drive library I've come across for FRC. Also worth mentioning is JLimelight, a simple Java wrapper for the vision processing unit we used.
A professional-quality typesetting of a composition done by my high school orchestra director when she was in high school, titled Brian's Song. This piece was an orchestra arrangement of an old song that she particularly liked. It hadn't been performed for decades until I found the original manuscript and offered to typeset it.

Tarballs of the source tree for each release of some of my projects can be easily obtained from the /pub directory of my web server, and some release folders also have a README that should contain documentation to build them. If you have enough interest in one of my projects, it would be a good idea to contact your software distribution's maintainers so they can add compiled builds to their software repositories, making it easier for you to install and use my software.

More recent releases are provided with checksums and signatures. You can verify that the source tarballs published before January 17, 2022 haven't been corrupted or tampered with by using gpg --verify on the signature file. All tarballs published after January 17, 2022 are signed using OpenBSD signify(1) instead. The process is essentially the same: download my signify public key, and check it against the signature file and the tarball.

If the verification succeeds, you can be absolutely certain that the source tarball you downloaded is valid and from me, Jordan Bancino. For this to work, you must have my public key imported to your local trust database. The best way to obtain my public key would be directly from me via some physical means such as a flash drive or floppy disk. However, if you are reaching this page in a way that you trust and believe to be secure, you can download my public keys directly:

Signify Public Key: jordan-bancino.pub
GPG Public Key: (Deprecated) pubkey.asc

You can also contact me via Matrix, and I can send you my keys that way.

Contributing

I would love to receive your contributions. My preferred way of accepting them is via Matrix. You can checkout my public projects' CVS modules and then generate patch files for your changes. Basic steps for this might look something like this:

$ cvs -d anoncvs@bancino.net:/cvs checkout -P Telodendria $ cd Telodendria $ vi README.txt # Make your changes $ cvs diff -uNp > your-changes.patch

You can then send me the generated patch file over Matrix. If you'd prefer, you can also make changes against the source tarballs published at the link above. Just extract the tarball two different locations, make your changes in one, and then generate the patch files against the other. I include these directions because I understand that not everyone uses CVS, let alone just for my projects. I'm not opposed to Git or anything, but CVS is built into OpenBSD, so that's what I use.

You can checkout each one of my public projects over SSH. Use this as the CVS root:

anoncvs@bancino.net:/cvs

There is no password on the anoncvs account. There is also no push access to anything in the anoncvs chroot. If you try pushing to any of the modules, it will fail and possibly even screw up your local copy. Just don't try to push, and generate patch files instead.

My server's SSH fingerprint is SHA256:/G6YFpbeXa6clHy3adk/64WIzZii+v10/UkDYsc01ks.

I don't have a frontend for my CVS repository just yet, but you can use rsync to list all of my public projects:

$ rsync bancino.net::cvs

Communications