About Deryck Hodge

I am a software developer with a love for the web, social spaces, new media, and free/open source software. I work for Canonical and spend my days hacking on the bugs application in Launchpad.

Prior to Canonical, I worked for a few different media companies -- Scripps, Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive, and Greenspun Media Group. I have particular expertise in social platforms and APIs, having participated in the Facebook Platform launch while at the Post and led tutorials at LinuxWorld and Usenix conferences on Google's web apps, APIs, and open source code. Believe it or not, I was even Emmy-nominated as a developer for my part on the news/documentary site onBeing.

I have been a part of the Samba Team since April 2004; I created the Samba news site and help maintain all the other Samba web sites. I contribute where I can to other free/open source software projects, and have released a few pieces of code of my own.

I live in a small town near Auburn, AL and work from my home. I am also a husband and father, with a wife I love dearly and two girls that make every day brighter. I am a devoted, if imperfect, follower of Christ.

When I'm not hacking, I love a good film, British postmodern fiction, and music, usually of the progressive, alternative, or folk kind.

Contact

Email is the best way to contact me. I'm just "deryck" at this domain, so:

deryck [AT] devurandom [DOT] org

You can also post a comment on the blog here. I try to respond whenever I can.

Elsewhere

Why the site name devurandom.org?

/dev/urandom is a random number generator in Unix-like operating systems. When I started this site, I was just getting into Linux for the first time, and a friend suggested the name when he sent me a /dev/urandom description from Linux kernel source. The quote, paraphrased, said that /dev/urandom is different from /dev/random in that it doesn't generate random numbers from entropy pool noise. /dev/urandom is better suited for large amounts of data, since it's not limited by available entropy. I thought the quote suited me -- you be the judge of why ;-) -- so devurandom.org was born.