Anyone who has played pétanque knows the moment. Two boules look equally close to the cochonnet, nobody brought a measuring tape, and the game stops while someone fetches one and kneels in the gravel. In French: il y a mesure.
[Read More]
Welcome
DevOps engineer with 20+ years of IT experience, building security-first infrastructure and automation solutions. Passionate about hardened, observable systems — and exploring new horizons both in technology and in life.
What I Do
Infrastructure & Automation
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) • Terraform • Kubernetes (K8s) • Docker & Podman • Salt Stack • Proxmox
Security
CIS & ANSSI hardening • Vault / OpenBao • mTLS & PKI • SSO (OIDC) • Least privilege
Network Security
Reverse proxies & TLS • Firewalls • Illumio microsegmentation • Cortex XSIAM • IDS/IPS & WAF • Fail2ban • DNS filtering • VPN
CI/CD
GitLab CI/CD • Forgejo Actions • Hardened CI runners • Git
Monitoring
Grafana Alloy • Prometheus • Zabbix
Development
Python • TypeScript • .NET • PowerShell • Bash • Django • FastAPI • Playwright
AI & Machine Learning
RAG • LoRA fine-tuning • Model training • AI-assisted engineering with human review
Databases
PostgreSQL • SQL Server • SQLite
Personal Projects
pétanque-mètre — measure which boule is closest from a single phone photo (source) • Self-hosted services • Homelab environment • Photography
Explore More
- About my journey → - From .NET developer to DevOps specialist
- Technical articles → - Insights on DevOps best practices
- GitHub projects → - Code and automation scripts
- Codeberg projects → - Open-source apps, including pétanque-mètre
- Photo gallery → - Adventures beyond the datacenter
Building reliable, scalable IT solutions while exploring the world one mountain at a time.
Port Open Is Not Healthy: Why My Homelab Monitoring Never Alerted
For a long time I believed my homelab was monitored. I had dashboards for the hypervisor, dashboards for the containers, a health script on the VPN gateway, and a metrics hub. Everything was green.
Then three separate things broke for weeks, and nothing told me. The dashboards were fine. The problem was that none of them could actually reach me, and the checks behind them were answering the wrong question.
[Read More]Managing Homelab Infrastructure with a Git Submodule Registry
When your homelab grows past a handful of services, a single git repository starts to feel like a junk drawer. Every service’s config, scripts, and docs are in the same commit history, every change touches multiple unrelated services, and cloning the whole thing just to work on one component is wasteful.
I went through this with my homelab. Here’s the pattern I landed on.
The Problem with Monorepos for Homelab
A monorepo made sense initially — one place for everything, simple history. But after adding a dozen services, the friction started:
[Read More]