About Me
My journey with software development started at a young age. In my early teenage years, MMOs were in their heyday and I spent entirely too much time playing RuneScape. Faced with the conflicting desires to level up in-game and to spend time socializing, I turned to botting in order to achieve both at once. The publicly available scripts were not very good, and my teenage hubris made me confident that I could create something better myself (spoiler alert: I could, and did).
At the tail end of my teenage years, I had gained enough skill to make a decent living (for a teenager, at least) from gold farming. I realized that this wasn't a sustainable "career" path, and I pivoted to developing enterprise software, mostly in the fintech space.
After about five years of that, accompanied by constant learning, I realized that software is the biggest force multiplier of the modern age. My goal in life has become to maximize the amount of work that one person can accomplish. With the advent of kubernetes, it is possible to stand on the shoulders of giants, and achieve things I could have never done on my own. Since 2021, the majority of my free time has been spent learning about and running all kinds of software, on all parts of the backend stack.
Why FOSS?
The short answer: I want to own my infrastructure, not rent it.
Cloud services are convenient until they're not. Pricing changes, features get deprecated, companies pivot or shut down entirely. I've watched too many useful tools disappear because they couldn't sustain a SaaS business model. With open source software running on bare metal, I control my own destiny. I have the source code. If a project gets abandoned or the maintainers make decisions I disagree with, I can fork it. If a critical bug needs fixing and upstream is unresponsive, I can patch it myself. No waiting on support tickets, no being held hostage by a vendor's roadmap.
Beyond philosophical reasons, the economics make sense. Cloud bills scale linearly with usage, but bare metal has a fixed cost that gets cheaper over time as you maximize utilization. A few thousand dollars in hardware can replace services that would cost tens of thousands annually in the cloud. The upfront investment pays for itself, and you're left with infrastructure that you control completely.
This isn't about avoiding the cloud entirely—it's about choosing the right tool for the job. But when I can achieve the same result with software I host myself, I do. It's forced me to learn the full stack: networking, storage, orchestration, monitoring, disaster recovery. The kind of knowledge you don't get when you're just clicking through a web console.
Contact
Looking to collaborate? Get in touch at work@fosspilled.dev