Viktor's Tech Musings & Security Paranoia

These days I run all my agents in ephemeral VMs on a dedicated VLAN, managed with Terraform and Ansible on top of Proxmox.

The other day my friend Chris pinged me on a Twitter thread.

Most leadership advice assumes the problem is information, that a founder stuck in the same pattern has simply not been told the right thing yet.

The encryption underpinning modern civilization was never designed to last forever.

A few weeks ago I wrote up the bash scripts I use to turn Ubuntu cloud images into Proxmox templates and clone them into VMs.

Containers were never designed to be a security boundary, yet we have spent the last decade treating them like one.

I’ve been clicking through the Ubuntu installer on Proxmox since 2019 – I even wrote a note to myself back then about the dance.

Digital sovereignty is becoming an increasingly hot topic, and people are starting to wake up to just how large the premium is for “cloud” versus simply running a few dedicated servers.

What happens when cybersecurity stops being an afterthought and becomes a legal obligation?

Long before ChatGPT, I was obsessively collecting health data.

What happens when you deliberately stress test your own operating system?

In Part 1, I replaced ipgeolocation.io with a self-hosted Rust service in under two hours.

We’ve all heard the saying that AI is eating SaaS.

What happens when long-lifecycle hardware meets modern cybersecurity expectations?

Over the last few days, I gave the sbomify website a much-needed overhaul.

What happens when a government’s push for “safety” starts reshaping the architecture of the internet?

I recently wrapped up a consulting gig helping a client troubleshoot some gnarly PostgreSQL replication issues.

Why do so many teams treat software security compliance as a box-ticking exercise, and what does that mindset cost them?

Is tech making us smarter—or just more distracted?

How do you design and ship coreboot and Linux hardware that actually works in the real world?

Marcus Taylor’s journey into technology spans over three decades, but his latest work at Planet Computers represents a fascinating convergence of everything he’s learned about hardware, networks, and resilient systems.

Sean Martin’s journey into software security spans over three decades, but his latest focus, software supply chain security, feels more relevant than ever.

Niklas Düster got involved with Dependency Track the way many great open source stories begin: by trying to solve a problem at work.

I hacked together DSLF today because paying a monthly fee for a plain 301 felt silly.

When I started my podcast a year and a half ago, I looked at the tools available.

Thorbjørn started with a simple insight: traditional entrepreneurship is inefficient.

I’ve been running my video podcast Nerding out with Viktor for about a year and a half now, with just under 50 episodes published.

In this episode, I’m joined by Carl Richell, founder and CEO of System76, for an in-depth look at what it takes to build an open source hardware company from the ground up.

I’ve previously written about my experiences with Home Assistant here and here.

In this episode, I’m joined by Jon Seager, VP of Engineering at Canonical, for a deep dive into the systems and practices that make remote teams thrive.

In this episode, I talk with Vlad Trifa, founder of Zimt and co-founder of EVRYTHNG (bought by Digimarc), about the challenges of applying Web3, crypto, and blockchain in real-world systems.

I’m excited to share that I’ve just given Sonar—a FastAPI-based BLE device counter I built years ago—a full overhaul and relaunched it as an open-source project on GitHub: https://github.com/viktopia/sonar Why Sonar?

In this deep-dive conversation, I sit down with Joshua Watt (Garmin) and Ross Burton (ARM) to explore how the Yocto Project is redefining how we build, secure, and maintain embedded Linux systems at scale.

In this deep-dive conversation, I sit down with Kevin Henrikson to explore what it really takes to scale technical teams, ship faster, and survive the transition from startup chaos to operating at enterprise scale.

I’ve been using split keyboards for about 20 years now, a journey sparked by the all-too-common wrist pain that plagues many a nerd hunched over a standard keyboard.

Update: Since this episode went live, Earthly announced that they ending their investment in the Earthly open source project.

When I wrote A Decade of Remote Work back in 2019, I had no idea a global pandemic would soon thrust remote work into the spotlight, turning it from niche to necessity overnight.

I recently helped a team migrate their Git repositories from Phabricator to GitHub.

In this timely conversation with Johan Christenson, founder of Cleura and board member of OpenInfra (overseeing Kata Containers and OpenStack), we dive into Europe’s growing urgency around digital sovereignty and what it will actually take to build a comp…

In this captivating conversation with Warren Houghton, we explore the secretive world of physical penetration testing.

I recently got a few affordable G3 Pro cameras to replace some less-than-stellar G4 Dome units I had in my setup.

In this insightful conversation with Marc Pous from Balena, we explore the evolving landscape of IoT and connected devices.

TLDR: I wanted to generate an up-to-date disk image for a Rock Pi 4 using Yocto that included CUPS and Docker to both get a better understanding of Yocto and test the new SBOM generation feature.

In this engaging conversation with Dustin Kirkland, we explored the fascinating world of container security and supply chain integrity through the lens of Chainguard’s innovative approach.

In my conversation with Warren Houghton, I gained a thorough understanding of penetration testing from both a strategic and technical standpoint.

I’ve been using Home Assistant for about seven years now, starting back when I was living in a small apartment.

In this episode, I speak with Kate Stewart from the Linux Foundation and Gary O’Neall, a long-time SPDX contributor, about the evolution of SPDX and its role in software transparency.

Over the last decade, I’ve spun up quite a few landing pages to gauge interest for upcoming products and features.

In this episode, I’m joined by Allan Jude, a distinguished FreeBSD developer and ZFS expert, to explore the fascinating world of advanced storage systems and operating system architecture.

In this episode, I’m joined by Ken Munro for an eye-opening discussion about security vulnerabilities in transportation and IoT systems.