Posts by Richard Darst
Notes on Debian with a read-only root
- 12 April 2026
I run several Raspberry Pis for home servers. They currently use SD cards for their root filesystems (the actual data is stored either on USB disks on NVMe disks), and I wanted a way to preserve the life of the SD cards. Can I make them more like an appliance, that just works and only rarely gets updates, rather than a normal server that’s always writing to disk.
Manifesto on university IT departments
- 10 March 2026
Alternative title: Challenging patterns with university IT for research
Book review: Systemantics
- 15 December 2025
I read the book Systemantics by John Gall. I saw some reference to it from another book, and Systemantics was short, so I figured why not. In the end, I’m glad I did - while it’s not scientific book, it’s given me a way to put various problems into words, which will probably be useful.
RSE lessons from Civil Engineering
- 31 July 2025
I have had a long-running metaphor of {academic researchers, research software engineers} being like {architects, structural engineers}. The basic idea is that coming up with interesting and worthwhile ideas/designs is a distinct field from giving ideas “structural integrity” (=reproduciblity and technical rigor).
