About Me

Hi, I’m Ethan.

I’m a Canadian software engineer living in Vancouver.

By day I work on cloud infrastructure, but this site isn't really about work. Outside of work, I write, build small things, tinker with Linux, drink coffee, go hiking when the weather cooperates, play board games with friends, and spend a probably unreasonable amount of time thinking about what computers are supposed to be for.

A lot of my ideas come back to a simple belief:

Computers should belong to the people using them.

That shows up in essays about software ownership, local-first systems, free software, privacy, terminals, RSS, personal websites, and why the internet got so weird. I am interested in tools that feel understandable. Systems that keep working. Software that doesn't treat the person using it like a guest in their own machine.

But this site isn't only about computers.

I also care a lot about history and genealogy. I love tracing family stories through old records, newspaper archives, government documents, signatures, addresses, salaries, and the tiny bureaucratic fragments people leave behind. There is something grounding about it. You find a name in a record from a hundred years ago and suddenly history stops feeling abstract. It becomes specific. A person lived somewhere. They worked somewhere. They moved, struggled, signed forms, raised families, joined arguments, and left little pieces of themselves scattered through the archive.

I think that interest connects to some of my technical interests more than it might seem at first. I like durable things. Records that survive. Systems that preserve context. Tools that make it possible to follow a thread through time.

Outside of that, I like ordinary things that do not need to become projects.

I like good coffee. I like walking through Vancouver when the city is grey and quiet. I like being in the mountains, even when I have dramatically underestimated a trail. I like long board game nights with friends where the rules take too long to explain and someone inevitably develops a grudge over resource placement. I like quiet weekends. I like having a cat around, even if she seems to believe every object I own is either a bed, a toy, or an obstacle placed there for her personal enrichment.

I think in all honesty, a lot of what I enjoy comes down to the same feeling: things that are specific, lived-in, and a little bit handmade.

A trail you have walked enough times to notice how it changes.
A coffee shop that knows what it is.
A board game night where everyone gets too invested.
A family record that turns a name into a person.
A piece of software that feels like someone cared.

This site is where I keep my writing, notes, projects, links, and experiments.

Some of it is polished. Some of it is me thinking out loud. Some of it will probably be useful only to future me. That's all fine. I am trying to leave more of my thinking in public instead of letting every idea disappear into a chat window, a social feed, or a forgotten text file.

I miss the version of the web where personal sites felt like places. Not brands. Not funnels. Not profiles inside someone else’s product. Places.

A little messy. A little specific. Full of links, notes, projects, opinions, and signs that a real person had been there.

That is what I want this site to be.

A place for computers, history, software, archives, small tools, stray thoughts, and whatever else I keep caring about.

If you want to reach me, email is best: ethan@ethanplant.ca. I read email, but I usually do not respond to unsolicited recruiting, sales, contract, or backlink requests.