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, old low-level experiments worth reviving, and a car project that somehow turned into a full diagnostic knowledge system.

PROJECT 01 · NOSTRAFORMA · SINCE 2009

Commerce systems,
search & automation.

Since 2009, working on the machinery behind an established European design-lighting shop: product data, search and enrichment, internal tooling, automation, compliance and the less visible systems that keep e-commerce moving.

e-commercesearchdataautomationcompliance

since 2009 / active

nostraforma.com ↗

PROJECT 02 · NSB + TINX

Not so boring SSL.
Tiny nginx.

Old experiments around BoringSSL and nginx, aggressively scoped for Debian Testing and Clang. Years before PQ TLS became mainstream, nsb/tinx was already experimenting with hybrid Kyber + X25519 key exchange alongside TLS 1.3, HTTP/2 and a deliberately reduced legacy surface. Kyber was selected by NIST in 2022 and standardized as ML-KEM in 2024. Shelved in 2019. Apparently not dead.

BoringSSLnginxTLS 1.3PQCHTTP/2Clang

rebooting

architecture notes ↓

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. This page is where those threads meet.

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.