Integrated by Design (opens in new tab)

The style of the blog post, with short, abrupt sentences does not captivate me. I’d like to think someone writing a book has a more interesting writing style. Or maybe LLMs have damaged me and I’m too critical of writing style now, whatever it is this doesn’t sell the book to me.

I started to read the blog post and got lost trying to shoot down all these aliens falling down from space. It's really a nice game integrated in the webpage. I was able to double my canon and even get a bigger blue laser. I wonder how much more weapon upgrades there is. Awesome game inside this blog.

No unencumbered epub, no sale.

This looks AI Slop. At first the style of the site and the cover of the book were a bit suspicious, but then digging a bit further:

- Domain was registered in February this year: https://www.whois.com/whois/vivianvoss.net

- Web archive has only a couple snapshots before this year, and it seemed to belong to an "Elite Escort": https://web.archive.org/web/20160515000000*/https://vivianvo...

- All his other domains are recently registered too, the oldest one `byvoss.tech` is from May 2025.

- GitHub has way too little projects and contributions for someone with such experience. The first project dates on the same day as the domain registration: https://github.com/VivianVossNet?tab=repositories

- As other people mentioned, too many blog posts lately (almost one a day), and a very weird writing style. Which doesn't seem at all that's because it's English as a second language. It's just plainly vague and disconnected sentences.

Here's a link to a few sample chapters https://vivianvoss.net/assets/files/integrated-by-design-pre... I enjoyed reading them - they presented a very clear arguement to select FreeBSD over Linux

Unrelated to the article, the game on the website is very addictive )) Had to get to the top of the leaderboard.

I ordered the hard copy, but for those with Kindle Unlimited....it's available there.

KU is for escape not text for me, so I'll wait for the book.

The page about the earnings[0] is interesting. The Amazon share for kindle edition is higher than I expected.

[0]:https://vivianvoss.net/print/integrated-by-design

This was surprisingly hard to read. Not in terms of sentence structure but in terms of coherence and meaning.

Also the book is $60 on Kindle and $80 for paperback? Who's the target audience?

A few honest answers, since the criticisms are reasonable.

On the domain: I bought vivianvoss.net in early 2026 without doing the homework CrociDB has now done for me. I had no idea about the previous owner, nor do I particularly care to find out, no more than I would investigate the previous tenant of a flat I had just moved into. I am still cleaning up after her in the search index, which has been a slightly absurd part of the launch.

On the editorial process: I am a German native speaker. The book is written in German, then translated and stylistically polished into English by Claude Opus, with my voice as the target and a great deal of back-and-forth on tone, idiom and rhythm. To me this is a tool, no different in function from the editorial pass any publisher runs on a manuscript, which equally shapes the final work. Five months on the book, paragraph by paragraph: re-read, re-arranged, rewritten, corrected. Up to three hours every morning on a single LinkedIn post or blog entry. A normal editorial process, with a faster collaborator than most.

On C. Lechat (Claudine le chat, ne pète pas): a French reading of 'ChatGPT' where 'chat' becomes the cat, and the parenthetical promises she does not, well, fart. The visual character on LinkedIn began as a separate decision. Every IT illustration the image generators produced was male, and my LinkedIn analytics matched, the audience was almost entirely men. So I insisted on a female developer in the artwork, headphones included. Somewhere along the way she merged with the editorial voice in the book and became C. Lechat. The follower demographics did shift in the direction I had hoped, for what it is worth. The framing is described in the introductory pages of the book; if you only saw the Amazon look-inside sample, you missed that section maybe.

On the six-month emergence: I was seriously ill at the end of 2025, and something had to change, rather drastically. I decided that if I had things worth saying after well over thirty years of doing this, I should probably write them down before I was no longer in a position to. I also live with chronic migraine and have functional days only two or three a week, which is one reason the GitHub footprint looks the way it does. I am not running a credibility farm. I am writing on the days I can, and on the others I would rather be at the creek with the dog. The conversation with readers has turned into a kind of recovery in its own right; as a former code monkey one rarely got that level of substantive engagement, and it is part of what is putting me back on my feet.

One aside, in genuine astonishment rather than complaint: it is striking how multifaceted a picture of a stranger can be drawn from a WHOIS record, an Amazon sample and a GitHub page. I have read it with more curiosity than dismay, and learned things about myself in the process.

On the photograph, while we are at it: it is a passport snapshot put through Affinity's AI background removal, which subtly altered the rest of the picture. It is still me, just very slightly improved. I was never the vain type, but I have come round to it.

Slop in the AI-slop sense it is not. Heavily edited and translated, yes. Authored, structured, fact-checked and re-read line by line by a man in Germany having rather more fun with this than he had expected, also yes.

This is also my first book. I am not a practised author, though I do have an eye for typography and the visual side, which mattered to me from the start: it had to please me and, with luck, the reader. I am aware it cannot be flawless, which is why I have deliberately set it up as an open book, with an issue link where anyone can contribute corrections or refinements, by name or pseudonym, credited in the next edition. A more interactive book that improves from version to version, with the community.

If you would rather I answered in German, you are welcome to ask. You will then run my German through some translator with an LLM in the back end, without the five months of stylistic calibration this one has had. Otherwise I will keep answering in the form that sits closest to my German.

Now it is up to you to dig further and keep me on my toes. Ask away. One small request: stay fair.

Hardcover not available on .co.jp, shame

I have had various servers over time running FreeBSD, both physically in my home, rented bare metal servers and rented VPSes.

So I’m not exactly a newcomer to FreeBSD, but I am wondering if this book might be relevant to me anyways.

My main issue with my servers that I would like to solve better, is how to organize the file system layout and ZFS “datasets” in a better way.

I generally don’t use separate disks for system and other things. Whatever number of disks are available, anywhere from a single disk or a pair of disks up to several handfuls of disks become a zpool where both the system is installed and all my data lives too.

For example, this is the zpool setup of one physical bare metal rented server I have, consisting of ten disks all put into a single raidz3 grouping:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        zroot       ONLINE       0     0     0
          raidz3-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            ada0p3  ONLINE       0     0     0
            ada1p3  ONLINE       0     0     0
            ada3p3  ONLINE       0     0     0
            ada5p3  ONLINE       0     0     0
            ada2p3  ONLINE       0     0     0
            ada4p3  ONLINE       0     0     0
            da0p3   ONLINE       0     0     0
            da1p3   ONLINE       0     0     0
            da2p3   ONLINE       0     0     0
            da3p3   ONLINE       0     0     0

This particular server I’m underutilising in terms of total amount of space I am using va how much it can hold, so it’s due to be replaced by something with fewer disks. At the moment I use this server only for backup storage, and that will be the role of the server that replaces it too.

Another physical bare metal server I rent has only two disks, so I have them in a mirror setup:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        zroot       ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            ada0p2  ONLINE       0     0     0
            ada1p2  ONLINE       0     0     0

I use ZFS send and recv to make backups of this server to the one with the many disks.

This server with the mirror pool runs some actual services like a couple of websites and a PeerTube instance etc, all in separate jails.

However, in spite of the goodness of having jails it’s still a bit of a mess I’ve made, that make it somewhat difficult (time consuming) to set up a new server with a similar setup to replace it one day when the disks give up and I have to restore from backup.

In particular I have a bit of config and other files spread out in the host system itself.

I am hoping that given that this book looks to be focused in part on practical examples, that perhaps if I buy this book I can get some inspiration for how I can better set up a new server and make it so that in the future that one in turn would be quicker to move between machines.

Also, the pool on the server with the mirrored disk setup has become extremely fragmented:

    NAME    SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  CKPOINT  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP    HEALTH  ALTROOT
    zroot  3.62T  3.18T   453G        -         -    48%    87%  1.00x    ONLINE  -

Which I am pretty sure is also the reason why sshing into it takes around 30 to 60 seconds to get to the shell.

What I really would like is to have it so that one ZFS “dataset” contains only the base system as it comes from a fresh install, and to have config changes I’ve added be separately stored and somehow overlaid on top of that. While at the same time having it so that when I install updates to the system, the default config files that are updated are not written out into the overlay but instead replace what’s below in the default install. If that makes sense.

And perhaps that instead of having many pkg installs for various tools in the host system that I add a sort of management jail where I can install various tools and edit files and manage the server, if possible.

Also I am wondering if running multiple instances of PostgreSQL server each in their separate jails is better, or having a single PostgreSQL server in a single jail that all the other jails share for services I have in jails where the services use PostgreSQL.

An interesting perspective. The tradeoffs here are genuinely complex and depend heavily on context that isn't visible from the outside. Would be curious to hear more about the failure modes encountered.