Installer fragility
Early installer logic assumed cleaner host environments than reality. Real users exposed all the edge cases quickly.
Projects
Mistborn
Mistborn is an open-source platform project that grew out of a practical question: can secure private infrastructure be approachable without cutting security corners?
How it started
- Wanted secure remote access for family and small-team systems without enterprise tooling overhead.
- Needed a repeatable way to stand up private services on commodity hardware.
- Kept seeing teams lose weeks gluing together networking, DNS, and collaboration tools manually.
What went wrong
Too many knobs too early
I added flexibility before I had strong defaults, which made onboarding harder than it needed to be.
Docs lagged architecture
The system changed faster than the docs. That mismatch created avoidable support overhead.
What I would do differently now
- Treat docs and upgrade paths as first-class features from the beginning.
- Constrain configuration surfaces until real usage patterns stabilize.
- Design for failure visibility before feature expansion.
Community contributions
Mistborn improved because people used it in environments I never would have predicted and then shared what broke.
- Issue reports with reproducible diagnostics that improved reliability for everyone.
- Hands-on testing across diverse hardware and home-lab environments.
- Feedback loops from independent reviewers that clarified what was genuinely useful.
Where does Mistborn live now?
The open-source codebase is available on GitLab. Treat it as a snapshot of where my private-networking thinking landed during that era.
Press & Independent Coverage
Mistborn was featured by Linux Pro Magazine, Awesome Open Source, and DB Tech.
- Linux Pro Magazine (Nov 2020)
- Awesome Open Source (Jul 2020)
- DB Tech (May 2021)