Hi everyone -- I'm Kerry, just signed up. I've been writing about infrastructure and security in other corners of the internet for a while, and Coder Legion kept coming up as a place that actually rewards discussion over polish, so I figured I'd stop lurking and join.
I'm a systems engineer who works at the intersection of infrastructure, security, and the messy reality of running AI where the stakes are real. I write a blog called The Digital First Responder, and the name is basically the thesis: I care about the systems that have to keep working when everything else is on fire. Real architecture, real failures, real decisions -- not thought leadership from 30,000 feet.
Most of what I do is hands-on. Self-hosted AI stacks on Ubuntu and ESXi, Ollama and Open WebUI, the odd discord.js bot, and a lot of time spent watching things break in ways the docs never warned me about. The writing comes out of the building, not the other way around. I don't have much patience for security takes from people who've never had to rotate every credential they own at 2am because something they trusted turned out to be holding the door open.
What pulled me here specifically is the format -- I'd rather post something that's wrong in an interesting way and get argued out of it than ship a clean piece nobody bothers to push back on. So I'm planning to bring the same kind of work I publish elsewhere and actually talk about it here.
Two questions for whoever's reading: what are you building right now, and what's the last thing that broke in a way you didn't see coming? That second one is where I learn the most -- so don't be shy about the embarrassing ones.