Have you ever considered how deeply digital infrastructure and cloud computing shape our modern relationships? Beyond that, how they fundamentally organise our resources, access to information, social realities, and cognitive labor?
These questions have become my daily preoccupation. Through extensive research and hands-on experience, I've been exploring alternatives to our current paradigms of centralised cloud infrastructures and internet access. Although I've left academia behind, my passion for these topics has only grown stronger as I started to build real-world solutions, leading me to share my insights through my Medium blog.
My writing focuses on several interconnected themes:
- Federation and decentralization strategies
- Local infrastructure development
- Practical tools and step-by-step guides
- Self-hosting and off-cloud strategies
- SaaS building and prototyping
- Creative coding
You shouldn't need to be a software engineer, a computer scientist, or have coding skills to understand and care about digital infrastructures. This knowledge is accessible to anyone asking the right questions, though finding clear insights through today's information noise can be challenging.
Recently, inspired by Ben Tarnoff's Internet for the People, I developed a workflow and wrote a bit of code that I'm excited to share. It's a simplified reverse proxy server designed specifically for self-hosting, making it easier for individuals to start building their own digital tools. By intentionally using less complex technology, replacing Nginx with Node.js, I've made it more accessible for people tinkering on consumer hardware. This can be useful for early prototypes of SaaS products, internet of things applications, APIs, LLM endpoints, databases, simple websites, or even early versions of services with medium traffic, regionalised e-commerces, and booking systems.
You can start reclaiming control over your digital presence right from your premises. The longer account, and the codebase, are here:
I'm happy to help with doubts or difficulties, and I'm open for feedback. Sites and services I have hosted from Zurich include medvilla.org, deskflot.com, sooft.studio, and ndr3svt.art.
Originally published on LinkedIn.