About This Site

I write about privacy, security, self-hosting, Linux and cloud infrastructure.

I spent a bit over two years as a security engineer before moving into cloud engineering, and I've worked primarily with AWS for the past three. The security background is why the cloud posts here tend to approach things from the direction of what breaks and what's exposed, rather than what's fastest to deploy.

Most of what I run, I host myself. This site runs on Ghost. Alongside it: FreshRSS for feeds, n8n for automation, AdGuard for DNS, and Uptime Kuma keeping an eye on whether any of it is still up.

What this site covers

Four areas, and they overlap more than they look like they should:

  • Privacy and security — the practical end. What to change, what it actually protects against.
  • Self-hosting — setup guides for things I run, including where they went wrong.
  • Linux and servers — hardening, configuration, the parts of the docs that assume you already know.
  • Cloud, mostly AWS — infrastructure from a security-first angle rather than a launch-fast one.

Plus tech more broadly when something's worth writing about and I have something to add.

The reason it exists: a lot of security writing is either vendor content with the conclusion decided in advance, or it's written for enterprise teams with budgets and staff. Neither is much help to someone running a €5 VPS who'd rather it didn't get compromised. That's the reader I have in mind, and most weekends it's also me.

How things get tested

Commands in a tutorial here get run on a real machine before the post goes out — usually a throwaway box on Hetzner I can break without consequence. Output shown in a post is real output, copied from a terminal rather than reconstructed
from memory.

Some posts contain affiliate links. They're marked, and there's a full affiliate
disclosure.

One rule: I only link things I actually use, and the recommendation comes before the link. Where the best option has no affiliate programme it still gets recommended — Mullvad turns up in VPN posts without one, because leaving it out to flatter the options that pay would make every other recommendation here worthless.

Elsewhere

Corrections and contact

If something here is wrong, out of date, or broke on your setup in a way the post didn't warn about, I'd like to know. Corrections get made and credited.

Feel free to ping me via: [email protected]

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