about @ stwoo.net

Welcome to stwoo.net.
There isn't a particularly complicated story behind this website. It is simply a place where I can put things. Ideas, projects, drawings, experiments, observations, pieces of writing, technical problems that somehow turned into entire evenings, and whatever else happens to catch my attention long enough for me to make something out of it.
I have never been particularly good at keeping my interests in separate boxes. Perhaps that is why this website ended up looking the way it does. It is part personal archive, part workshop, part sketchbook, and part whatever happens to be occupying my head at a given moment.

I'm Vedad, a software developer, systems administrator, and artist from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Most of my everyday work revolves around computers in one form or another. I write software, build and maintain systems, configure networks, work with servers, break things, fix them, and occasionally wonder why something that worked perfectly yesterday has decided that today is the day it will stop working.
But the technical side of things has never really existed in isolation.
I've always enjoyed making things, regardless of what they happen to be made from. Sometimes that means writing code. Sometimes it means building a system out of whatever hardware happens to be lying around. Sometimes it means drawing something with no particular purpose at all. And sometimes it means sitting down and trying to put a thought into words because it has been wandering around my head for too long.
I suppose that is where the fusion happens.
The boundary between art and technology is much less solid than it first appears. A well-designed system has a certain kind of beauty to it. A drawing can have structure, rules, layers and constraints. A piece of software can be expressive. Even something as seemingly dry as a network has a personality once you have spent enough time looking at it.
The diagrams are always clean until you build the actual network.
Then there is always a device that doesn't quite fit where it should. A cable that needs to go somewhere else. A configuration that makes absolutely no sense until you discover that one setting you forgot about six months ago.

The same thing happens with code.
The same thing happens with art.
Perhaps the same thing happens with everything.

That is more or less what I explore here. The technical side naturally finds its way onto these pages — development, system administration, hardware, networks, personal projects and all the other rabbit holes that come with spending too much time around computers. But alongside that are the things that have nothing to do with computers at all: visual work, traditional art, ideas, observations and occasional attempts to understand the strange place we happen to exist in.

Some of those things become finished pieces.
Some remain experiments.
Some probably should have remained scribbles.
I don't particularly mind which.

There isn't a grand purpose behind stwoo.net. I am not trying to build an empire out of it, nor is there a carefully planned editorial strategy hiding somewhere behind the scenes. I simply wanted a place that was mine — somewhere I could put things without having to make them fit into somebody else's format.
The internet has become very good at giving everything a purpose, a category, a metric and a target audience.
I don't really need this place to have one.
It can just exist.

It can be technical one day and philosophical the next. It can contain something carefully constructed alongside something completely ridiculous. It can be useful, beautiful, unnecessary, unfinished, or all of those things at once.
It is simply a record of things I found interesting enough to make, think about, or write down.
And perhaps that is the only real goal of this place: