About
I write infrastructure people run on their own servers, and I try to be honest about what it does.
I did not start in engineering. My degree is in business administration, and my first job title was project administrator. What changed things was building websites on the side from 2016 and discovering I cared less about how they looked than about why the third one was slow when the first two were not.
The middle of my career was spent as a data analyst in Lagos, at Sheffield Nigeria. That is the part people skip over when they read the CV, and it is the part that shaped how I work. Analysis teaches you that the number you expected and the number you measured are different things, and that the gap is where the interesting problem is. I have never really stopped doing that, I just point it at servers now.
In 2023 I moved to the UK and took an MSc in Applied Data Science at the University of Essex. Since September 2024 I have led technical delivery on the platform at Sportsafe UK, a national B2B supplier selling to schools, clubs and councils.
Alongside that I build and open-source infrastructure in Go. Not tutorials or demos: a hosting control panel that refuses a deployment which makes a site slower, a backend platform where PostgreSQL is the only infrastructure, a Docker Compose control plane whose central promise is that your containers keep running if it stops. All three exist because I wanted the thing and did not want to rent it.
What I believe about building
Opinions I hold with evidence
Most infrastructure is added before it is needed
Across everything I have built there is no Redis, no message broker, no separate search service. PostgreSQL does job queues, full-text search, pub/sub and row-level security, and one database you understand deeply beats four you understand approximately. Departing from that needs a stated reason, not a preference.
A benchmark you cannot reproduce is marketing
When I compared Slipstream against a commercial competitor I ran both on the same physical server, one at a time, with the OS reinstalled in between, because two supposedly identical servers measured 2.5 times apart for me on the same workload. The method is published with the numbers, and so is the metric where the competitor wins.
Security is a boundary you can point at
"Secure" as an adjective means nothing. In Slipstream the unprivileged API cannot reach the system directly; it sends typed commands to a root agent over a socket, and commands are argv arrays rather than shell strings. In Windlass a lint rule fails the build if privileged imports appear outside one package. Boundaries that are checked automatically are the only ones that survive.
Writing down what failed is worth more than what worked
Kernel TLS is widely recommended and cost 28% of cached throughput on my workload. Flattening a release docroot gained 8% and was not worth the risk to rollback. Both sit in the code with their numbers, so the next person, including me in a year, does not repeat the experiment.