personal engineering lab

Systems.
Security.
Odd machines.

I build, simplify and occasionally resurrect systems around e-commerce, search, web infrastructure and applied cryptography — plus one increasingly over-engineered Audi A2 diagnostic platform.

Selected work ↓

single file · no framework · no tracking Debian · Clang · C/C++ · PHP · Python · JS

01 / SELECTED WORK

Things that refuse to stay small.

A mix of day-job systems, a revived low-level web stack, and a car project that somehow turned into a full diagnostic knowledge system.

PROJECT 01 · NOSTRAFORMA · SINCE 2009

Commerce systems,
search & platform engineering.

Since 2009, working on the machinery behind an established European design-lighting shop: product data, native search and enrichment, ERP and internal tooling, payments, security, technical SEO, automation, compliance and the operational systems that keep a long-running e-commerce platform moving.

e-commercesearchERPsecuritypaymentsautomation

since 2009 / active

nostraforma.com ↗

PROJECT 02 · nxTLS · 2026 REBOOT

Small HTTPS stack.
Strong opinions.

The successor to nsb2 and TinX: a deliberately small, modern HTTPS stack built from nginx, BoringSSL and strong opinions. The original projects were already experimenting with TLS 1.3 before the standard was finished, X25519, post-quantum KEMs, SipHash-backed file caching and Argon2-based basic auth. Some of those choices looked unusually opinionated at the time and considerably less so in hindsight. nxTLS keeps that philosophy, but rebuilds it around pinned upstream components, a minimal patch delta and a reproducible Debian build.

The philosophy survives. The fork debt does not.

nginxBoringSSLTLS 1.3PQCHTTP/2 + HTTP/3Clang

rebooting / 2026

successor to nsb2 + tinx ↓

PROJECT 03 · A2 SYSTEM EXPLORER

Diagnosis as a
navigable system.

A living diagnostic and knowledge explorer for the Audi A2: system topology, evidence, failure paths, components, 3D context and a growing model of how the car actually behaves when the wiring decides to become creative.

diagnosticsknowledge graph3DautomotiveAudi A2

active lab

open explorer ↗

02 / BIASES

Opinionated by design.

Not a résumé keyword cloud. Just recurring choices that tend to show up in the things I build.

Small surface

Remove what the system does not need. Compatibility is useful until it becomes the product.

Current primitives

Modern protocols, explicit crypto policy, current compilers and fewer historical defaults.

Inspectable

Prefer systems that can be understood, traced, measured and taken apart without ceremony.

Useful first

Tools should solve the actual problem before they become a platform, framework or religion.

03 / ABOUT

Still no time for a website.

So this one is a single HTML file.

Most of my projects start with a fairly simple question and end somewhere between architecture archaeology, compiler flags, protocol details, product data and a wiring diagram. I tend to like systems that can be reduced until their assumptions become visible — and then rebuilt with fewer of them.

Looking back at nsb2 and TinX, quite a few of the ideas that seemed unnecessarily opinionated at the time aged surprisingly well.

The ideas were worth keeping. Owning the entire implementation was not.
nxTLS is not a continuation of the old codebase; it is a continuation of the judgment behind it.

04 / CONTACT

Say hello.

Comments, corrections, strange bugs and interesting rabbit holes are all valid reasons.

daniel [at] xcx [dot] cc

No form. No newsletter. No CRM funnel. Just email.

05 / IMPRINT

Imprint.

Legal notice / Anbieterkennzeichnung for xcx.cc.

Contact details

Daniel Hirche
c/o Lumen Lighting Nostraforma GmbH & Co KG
Bodenseestr. 129
81243 München
E-Mail: daniel [at] xcx [dot] cc

Systems.Security.Odd machines.