Adam Schaefers
Devops | Full stack dev | Gamedev | Founder

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TL;DR: Linux nerd → DevOps wrangler → indie gamedev. 🐧 → ☁️ → 🎮

🗺️ The Quest Log

2025 – now · 🎮 Founder, Land of Enchantment Games
My personal indie game studio, based in New Mexico.
Also cooking 🍳: my side projects
- merecatholicity.com (Git): my eclectic ecumenical project. It includes a self-published book, Mere Catholicity (public domain, typeset in LaTeX for PDF, paperback and Logos), a library of the Fathers, councils and classics re-typeset from public-domain sources, and merecat 🐈, an AI research librarian that answers from the library with citations. I built it serverless: a PureScript, lit-js and Tailwind front end over a custom headless API backend on Cloudflare Workers, with D1 (SQLite), R2 (S3-compatible storage) and Durable Objects for real-time chat. A GitHub Actions CI/CD system ships both the application and its Terraform infrastructure, with approval gates before production, staged rollouts and nightly tests against production. For the community side I borrowed the best bits of the old internet: 4chan-style auth, Snapchat-style DMs, Signal-style end-to-end encryption, and Facebook-style profiles and walls.
- stasislinux.org (Git): my own Linux distro, the natural follow-through of my years as a package maintainer on KISS Linux with Dylan Araps.
- backseat-driver: my tutor for keeping AI-era programmers' fundamentals sharp.
- .emacs.d: my Emacs config. It starts in about 0.2s, with everything deferred through use-package. It prefers built-ins (eglot, flymake), runs on vertico/corfu/tree-sitter, and binds the same SLIME-style keys in every language.
2020 – 2025 · ☁️ DevOps @ Upgrade, Inc. · Immaculata Studios, LLC · Skvare, LLC
Herded Kubernetes, Terraform (5k+ lines of homegrown modules), AWS, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and a Postfix server that sent a million emails a month without landing in spam. Rode the industry's evolution from LAMP-stack monoliths to IaC-driven cloud microservices, right up to the arrival of AI automation, which is when I turned to solo gamedev.
2017 – 2020 · 🐧 Open Source Hermit
Spent 10+ hours a day learning Linux from the kernel up. Maintained packages for KISS Linux, wrote docs for Funtoo, and built Themelios (a NixOS ZFS-on-root installer) and Spartan Emacs. Got commits merged upstream (e.g. libcap). Also went viral on Hacker News by booting my Linux distro with Emacs as init (systemE).

🎧 Off the clock

Professional music recording, aspiring DJ, and I play guitar. 🎸 Big fan of electronic music, house and techno. I love traveling in Europe, especially Greece. 🇬🇷 Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, and an avid fly fisherman. 🎣

🤖 The slop shelf

My secondary GitHub, @el-sloppo, is where I push my favorite AI slop projects. Most of them live under Emacs-OS:

embr.el: a web browser inside Emacs. Emacs is the display server and headless Chromium is the renderer, streamed over CDP screencast. It has EXWM-style key passthrough, optional Vimium-style modal navigation, and a native C rendering path built on the Emacs canvas patch. It doubles as a proof of concept for getting that patch mainlined.
jellyfin-emms-mpv.el: browse and play your Jellyfin library from Emacs. Music goes through EMMS and video through mpv, with poster galleries, and playback position syncs back so "Continue Watching" stays accurate.
elcava: a cava clone in pure Emacs Lisp. It captures system audio from PipeWire, runs the FFT in Elisp, and draws a live Unicode spectrum in a buffer.
el-init: Emacs as PID 1, for real this time. It's a systemd-inspired service supervisor written in Emacs Lisp, with a dependency graph, targets, an M-x elinit dashboard and an elinitctl CLI, plus an optional static-build patchset that turns Emacs into an actual init. It's the spiritual sequel to systemE and the core of Emacs-OS.