A week on the farm with Dylan Araps
10-14-2026 — Adam Schaefers
Republished from my blog at adamschaefers.com, where it first appeared on October 13, 2026.
I first met Dylan Araps on IRC seven or eight years ago. I had taken an interest in minimalist Linux distros, and he was working on a brand new one called KISS Linux. (You may know him from Neofetch or the Pure Bash Bible.) The old site is still online, and the project lives on today at kisscommunity.org.
While KISS was new and exciting and at its most active, I became the number two committer on the project, behind Dylan. Mostly I maintained the GNU stack in the community repository. I also tested the package manager's features, hunting for edge cases and bugs, and helped with the init scripts.
Today KISS is mature, really a finished product, or a finished idea: a Linux distro simple enough for one person to maintain as an island unto itself, with a small group of enthusiasts still to be found on IRC, on Libera now that freenode is no more.
Have taken up farming
Then Dylan went AWOL, and nobody really knew how he was doing. By then I had moved on too. I had gotten married, paid work left me no time for KISS, and I had orphaned my packages.
In March 2024 I opened a pull request on his old profile repository, "Hope you're good", wondering if he'd throw us a bone and let everyone know how he was doing. A couple of months later his profile said "Have taken up farming." We were all happy for him, though we didn't know what that really meant.
In January 2026, nearly two years later, he finally explained.
I related to the physical pain and the mental agony, the burnout from software development he described, so I sent him an email: I wanted to see the farm.
He said come on over.
The WILD Project
We set some dates, and later I learned the farm is the WILD Project, a WWOOF host. They grow grapes and olives, mostly, and make wine and olive oil, among other things.
But look closely at the few clips I shared and you'll see it's more than that. They are community minded, and they want to preserve an older way of life. When you arrive, there are yurts and camp mats provided. It's a very simple arrangement, and it put me in mind of one of the things Marcus Aurelius thanked his teacher Diognetus for:
To choose the Greek lifestyle—the camp-bed and the cloak.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 1.6 (tr. Gregory Hays)
And they're working to be self-sufficient in as many ways as possible from the farm, while pursuing philosophy and simple living.
It's KISS Linux, real life edition.
Dylan's family has something they believe is good, beautiful and true, and they share it with anyone moved to come and see for themselves: people willing to work with open minds and open hands, open to learning and open to sharing, to giving and to receiving.
Group think kills
There is lively discussion around the table at meals, often difficult, and no question is off limits. They are after what Aristotle called the good life. But what is the good life? How do you get there? Bring your favorite talking points, the accepted opinions your university or your favorite streamer drilled into you, and you may find yourself challenged. I saw it happen. It's a kind of challenge that's rare nowadays, because they are pushing against group think: "group think kills" is handwritten on one of the windows by the dining table.
You're free to think what you want, but you're expected to form your own views and not to hold them as sacred cows. In software we stress test our programs and systems for strength, weaknesses, scalability problems, bugs, edge cases and exceptions. Dylan and his family may be out of the software business, but I reckon they're in the truth-seeking business, the philosophy business. They may not talk about the Unix philosophy in terms of programs anymore, but they may be applying it to everyday life in ways we never thought possible.
Grounded
All of this, along with living close to the land, is a search for what might be called reality, which is hard to find in a world that is chronically online and yet disconnected. Many of us, myself included at times, are prone to illusions and fantasies. We fall out of touch because we aren't grounded, whether because we don't grow our own food, or because we keep doing things we know are wrong, to our own inner compromise and detriment.
On that last point, I was surprised by how seriously this family takes doing the right thing. They are just going to do the right thing, as they see it, damn it, at all costs. That is admirable, and it is very hard to find.
Coming clean
This next part is harder to write.
I wanted to stay longer and help with the grapes and the olives, but I brought some health problems with me to the farm. The work itself was entirely reasonable. That one's on me.
I stayed about a week, enjoyed the company, gave my thanks as best I could, and bid them farewell, but not before learning all about vegan cooking and eating, and taking some of their wisdom home with me. I hope to return soon, in better health, and finish what I started.
To Dylan and his family: thank you. Not goodbye, just see you later.
Adam