My university in Germany operates entirely in English. The academic world is very international so it often falls back to English to support the faculty and students. Issues in the community will also be run through the university news routes, so while I’ve been learning German, I’ll also have a big resource with my work community.

There’s a few places to check for positions. I interviewed in Ireland and Scotland as well (didn’t get the jobs). There’s also Australia and new Zealand hiding out there. Or Canada. Hell, Mexico has a great university system you could look into.

Your PhD does open new doors. It’s by no means a guarantee of a faculty spot, but it’s valued so you can leverage it.

The position is in Germany. It might be out of the frying pan and into the fire given Germany’s right wing rise, but that’s happening across the western nations and we’re all in trouble.

I don’t have a ton of advice for you. I defended over 10 years ago, so I’m moving straight into a tenured/permanent position as senior faculty. For an ABD, I’m not sure what the landscape looks like these days.

If you want to make the move, start talking to people. Reach out to people publishing in your field and talk shop. Collaborate with them, talk about the future, and be willing to take a postdoc (or german system W1) position. It’s more ramen and a small bedroom, but it’s one where there’s healthcare and civil rights.

Academia (and most professions) are all about networks. Talk with people, collaborate, and grow that network. Something will come along.

Good thing I’ve just accepted a faculty position outside the US.

I’ll get to move to a country that doesn’t persecute academics and I think I’m just beating the crowds on the way out.

I bought a 386 motherboard that needed a patch. Not software, but by soldering a wire between two pads. You just basically figure it out and went from there with a soldering iron.

Build the computer from parts? Sure. Soldered it like it came as discrete components? Also sure.

Tech savvy is often in context of when you were learning in your teens to early twenties and then what of that skill set is still applicable today.

They’re also building mass transit with trams and metro lines like crazy. Paris is knocking it out of the park as a developed city should be.

We had a similar issue back in 2004 or so. Downloading a browser (Mozilla) was a bout 40MB. Normally it took about 30 seconds to pull it down on our University Internet. Then one day we were setting up systems and every time we clicked the download button nothing seemed to happen.

Further inspection showed that it had many successful download in under 1 second each. Our IT network team got us linked up to Internet2. It was able to download so fast that the bottleneck was the IDE bus of about 40MB/s. The file was coming from Intel over I2 so we couldn’t even see it download before it was done.

I had a three year bender with OpenBSD back in 2001-2003 or so. I even started building my own kernels and doing a tiny bit of hacking on the code. There’s all kinds of interesting tools and systems out there if you start exploring.

It sounds like you want to bring Sorcerer Linux back.

The packages were kept in the Grimore and you cast spells to build, install, etc.

https://distrowatch.com/table-mobile.php?distribution=sorcerer

It was a very early source-based distro.