Stay home.
Run your own stuff.

I got into tech the way a lot of people do: building things because I needed them, not because I had a plan. What kept me here is the realisation that the internet doesn’t have to be the internet we have. It can be smaller, weirder, more yours.

Self-hosting

Everything in the homelab chapter of this portfolio runs on a machine in my house, on bare metal I can touch. I can SSH into it at 2am, look at the logs, and understand exactly what it’s doing. That’s not a scalability strategy. It’s a way of staying in relationship with the systems I depend on.

Outsourcing everything to managed platforms is convenient until it isn’t. Costs spike, APIs change, companies fold. Infrastructure you run yourself ages differently. It accumulates knowledge rather than dependency.

Open source

Nothing I’ve built is novel. Every project here stands on work that other people gave away: Linux, Docker, Postgres, Next.js, the whole stack. The least I can do is give back where I’m able: open-sourcing what I build when it’s mine to open-source, contributing upstream when I find a bug, writing up what I learned so the next person doesn’t spend three hours on the same thing.

FOSS isn’t really a political position for me so much as a practical one. Software you can read and modify is software that works for you. Everything else is a rental.

Craft

I care about the quality of what I build, not in a way that prevents shipping, more in a “would I be embarrassed to show someone this code in a year” way. Good software isn’t about clever abstractions. It’s about the next person (usually future-me) being able to understand what’s happening and why.

The solarpunk aesthetic you see in this portfolio is genuinely how I think about technology. Systems as ecosystems. Infrastructure as something that can be beautiful and comprehensible, not just functional and opaque.

“The most radical thing we can do is stay home.”

- adrienne maree brown

That quote lives in the footer of this site because it’s true about more than geography. Build the thing. Host the thing. Understand the thing. Stay close to the work.