~0x64616E69656C
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.

static HTML · no framework · no tracking Debian · Clang · C/C++ · PHP · Python · JS
01 / SELECTED WORK

Things that refuse to stay small.

Production systems, edge security, low-level protocol work and one 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 · NGINX EDGE SECURITY

Hardening the edge.
Without confusing signals with trust.

A living field guide to operating nginx as an internet-facing security edge: protocol lanes, ALPN shunting, H1 containment, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, CIDR-backed crawler and service policy, Lua policy orchestration, resource-cost controls, proxy trust boundaries, request lifecycle and observable fail-closed behavior.

nginxedge securityprotocol lanesLuatrust policyobservability
living field guide
open edge-security guide ↗
PROJECT 03 · 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
open nxTLS ↗
PROJECT 04 · 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.

01

Small surface

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

02

Current primitives

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

03

Inspectable

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

04

Useful first

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

03 / ABOUT

Different systems.
Same instinct.

The projects have their own pages now. This is the common thread between them.

Most of this starts with something that already exists.

Commerce platforms, search, nginx, TLS stacks and a twenty-six-year-old car have surprisingly similar failure modes: assumptions accumulate, boundaries blur, and the useful part gets buried under compatibility, folklore or accidental complexity.

I like pulling those systems apart until the real constraints become visible — then making the smallest change that makes them easier to understand, operate or trust.

Build what the system actually needs.
Keep the boundaries explicit. Let everything else justify its existence.

04 / CONTACT

Say hello.

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

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

05 / IMPRINT

Imprint.

Legal notice / Anbieterkennzeichnung for xcx.cc.