Every program starts here.
It felt right to open this the same way — a single line that signals something is beginning, even if you're not sure yet what exactly it is.
Who I Am
I'm Soren. I've been building software professionally for over ten years, and in that time I've worn enough hats to fill a wardrobe: full-stack developer, cloud architect, systems engineer, occasional CTO. The thread running through all of it is that I care about how things actually work — not just that they work.
The projects I've shipped span a wide range: a real-time NLP sentiment pipeline processing gigabytes of financial data in under 50ms, a 12-node Kubernetes cluster built from bare metal with full GitOps and observability, a zero-knowledge encrypted social network, an IoT computer vision system running YOLOv8 on a Jetson Nano. Each one taught me something the documentation doesn't say.
I live mostly in TypeScript, Go, Python, and Linux. I have opinions about infrastructure. I run my own homelab. I think Rust is genuinely good and not just aesthetically pleasing to have in a stack. I believe most software fails from underspecification, not bad code.
What This Space Is For
This isn't a portfolio dressed up as a blog. I already have that — it's the terminal you're reading this through.
This is a place to think out loud. To write down what I actually believe about engineering problems and tools and tradeoffs, rather than what sounds good in a slide deck. I don't plan to publish tutorials. There are plenty of those. What I want to write are the things I wish I'd found when I was searching.
The kind of post that says: here's what we tried, here's where it broke, here's what the numbers actually looked like, and here's the thing nobody mentioned in the docs.
What's Coming
Writing
Technical deep-dives. The kind with real benchmarks, honest failure analysis, and actual architectural decisions — not the sanitized "here's a happy path" version. If I'm writing about Kubernetes, it'll include the incident that taught me why. If I'm reviewing a framework, I'll tell you when I almost switched away from it.
Cadence: when I have something worth saying, not on a schedule.
Tech Reviews
I use a lot of tools. Some are better than they appear; some are worse. I want to write honest takes aimed at engineers who already know how to read a GitHub repo — not beginner guides, not marketing. If a new framework claims to be fast, I'll run it, profile it, and tell you what I actually saw.
Hardware too — I'm particular about my tools, from mechanical keyboards to the ARM boards running in my rack.
Podcast
This one I've been sitting on for a while. The format I have in mind is conversational — something closer to a long phone call with an engineer I respect than a produced show. Topics will cover software, products, tech culture, and the kind of decisions that are hard to talk about in a standup. I'll go solo when I have something to work through, and bring guests when there's someone worth hearing from.
No video. I genuinely don't want to manage a camera. Audio only, and that's a feature.
If any of this sounds like your frequency, stick around.
You can follow along however you like — RSS (coming), the contact form below, or just check back when you feel like it. I'm not trying to build an audience. I'm trying to build something useful.
— Soren