Hi, I’m Justin. 👋 I’m a computer engineer, geek, and avid reader living in Central Illinois, where I currently work for Precision Planting, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of AGCO.

I was first introduced to computers in the 1990s at school, and have been hooked ever since. In the early years I mostly used Windows, followed by macOS in 2005 (with my first personal laptop), and Linux-based operating systems in 2012 (at work). I now use macOS and Arch Linux on a daily basis, and only occasionally use Windows, mostly for gaming.

About this site

I first registered JustinVollmer.com on January 6, 2014, and initially hosted the site on SquareSpace, which I selected due to its ease of use and quality design.

After a few years I tired of the limitations imposed by SquareSpace, and in 2017 I decided to migrate to my own Wordpress instance, hosted on AWS Lightsail (see this blog post). Wordpress gave me more flexibility in my design, and would last me until I became obsessed with the idea of static site generators.

In November 2020 I migrated from Wordpress to Hugo, and selected DigitalOcean as my host (see this blog post for more information).

In November 2024 I upgraded to a new theme, my own fork of the Bilberry Hugo Theme, and began adding IndieWeb support (which is ongoing).

LLM Policy

I debated how to approach the topic of LLMs, and finally decided to just write a policy block in my About page.

I am not inherently opposed to LLMs, though I think they are overused, and I do have issues with the way current LLMs were trained. However, I attempt to be pragmatic in most aspects of my life, and as I don’t foresee LLMs going away anytime soon, I have to have a policy for how I’ll use them, especially since they can be used to generate blog posts.

So, my policy: I have used, and will continue to use, LLMs for proofreading and editing for my blog. Unless explicitly stated, I will never use an LLM for content generation. My blog is written by me, the human, and that will continue. I will also use LLMs personally for other purposes (data analysis, summarization, research, etc), knowing their limits, and only making use of the technology as it makes sense.

Similarly to how someone doesn’t explicitly when they use spellcheck or a tool like Grammarly, or even better, a human proofreader/editor, I will not comment every time I use an LLM for proofreading or editing. However, I will always explicitly state if a post was heavily influenced or generated by an LLM. If such a note does not occur during the introduction, the post was written by me.