Distributed systems · Storage · Security · Infrastructure · Local AI
Born and raised in Germany with Vietnamese roots, currently doing my PhD in Canada.
I like building things, messing around with systems, and whatever I'm digging into at the moment. Right now that's mostly agent harnesses, security tooling, and small local models.
My PhD work is around distributed storage and key management, especially what happens when systems get busy, nodes disappear, or failover has to work outside the happy path.
Outside of that, I spend a lot of time with NixOS, self-hosting, developer tools, infrastructure, and side projects that have a habit of becoming slightly larger than intended.
A fairly common sequence of events:
Find a tool → try it → hit one annoying limitation → try a few alternatives → build something instead.
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A large part of my PhD work revolves around distributed KMS designs for storage systems, with a focus on request handling, scaling, and failure behavior. The interesting part usually starts when the happy path stops being happy. |
A control plane for heterogeneous infrastructure. Machines, services, and environments are rarely as uniform as we'd like them to be. Ground Control currently supports Proxmox and Xen Orchestra through one interface, with the architecture set up so more providers can be added without redesigning the whole thing. |
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I'm interested in how far you can push a small local model when more of the work is handled by the harness and tooling around it. I've been testing tool policies, delegation, context handling, and failure modes — less "which model feels better?" and more "what actually changed, and can I measure it?" |
My NixOS config stopped being just a config a while ago. It's now where I experiment with reproducibility, Wayland, containers, self-hosting, multi-machine setups, and whatever else I've decided would probably be nicer if it were declarative. |
I usually contribute upstream when fixing something makes more sense than maintaining a workaround.
Some recent examples:
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TokenTracker - Linux/NixOS and WSL support, provider integrations, parser work, and making token accounting less wrong.
Antigravity process + port detection · Command Code limits · Antigravity token accounting · DeepSeek Harness v3 -
Serpantinum - fixes around Wayland desktop behavior and display-manager integration.
SDDM compositor handling · autohide tray behavior -
Specht - security tooling, vulnerability management, and fixes that occasionally require learning far more about a subsystem than expected.
Most of my day-to-day coding is in Go and Python. The rest depends on whatever I'm working on.
Most of what I build ends up somewhere around backend services, research prototypes, developer tools, automation, benchmarks, dashboards, and small tools for problems I got tired of working around.
Always happy to connect, whether it's about distributed systems, open source, research, local AI, or some weird tool you've been tinkering with.
Stay curious. Keep tinkering.