System Architect & Software Developer. 37 years in the game. 26 professionally.
Building minimal tools that earn every byte. Inspired by the demoscene. Guided by Unix philosophy. Using AI to engineer, educate and validate, not to replicate the bloat faster.
I design systems where reduction is the method, not the compromise. Small binaries. Semantic markup. Honest interfaces. Every abstraction must justify its weight.
Currently Senior Developer at a German DIY wholesale giant, working with React, TypeScript, and Spryker. Privately building small tools for testing ideas, ultralight and rooted in demoscene constraints.
System architecture, performance engineering, and the frontend that sits on top of both. Full-stack, if you must; I prefer to call it taking responsibility for the whole path.
The common thread is root cause over symptom: I would rather remove the reason a system is slow than buy hardware to outrun it.
I keep a German-language record of how that diagnosis is done, at advisor.vivianvoss.net: what gets measured, what a written finding contains, and where the system boundary is drawn. It documents a way of working rather than an offer; I take no mandates.
The writing here runs in three parallel series: Lean Software, on building less and getting more; Unix Universe, on the operating systems that outlived their critics; and IT Philosophy, on why we keep making the same expensive mistakes. Different angles, same argument: complexity is a cost, not an achievement.
/series
├── running
│ ├── unix-universe Mon
│ ├── the-bench-marker Tue
│ ├── lean-software Wed
│ ├── it-philosophy Thu
│ ├── technical-beauty-scope Fri
│ └── bytes-of-art Sat
└── archive 19 series, 2024–2026
A whole host in eleven lines and 285 bytes, in a file the shell itself reads. The arguments you type by hand are the arguments that persist, and sysrc writes the same string from a script. One pattern covers 133 services; 3,022 lines of shell cover all of service management.
A readme that claims the intro was made of iron oxide, rocket fuel and a special sabre, and every item names real software. 64,512 bytes against a limit of 65,536, two samples in the whole soundtrack, third at Revision 2017 by twenty-one points, and the category winner at the Meteoriks a year later.
Apple removed it from macOS 15 for sound reasons. On FreeBSD it still runs at one minute past three: 56 scripts, a driver of 123 lines, and four exit codes as the entire reporting vocabulary. The daily set takes 0.26 seconds and returns 41 lines. The file that would configure it does not exist until you write it.
An engineer brings one page to the budget round: the logs, the firewall and the storage are already in the base system. The page is correct, and the vendor wins. Splunk spent 1.62 billion dollars on sales and marketing in a year; the FreeBSD Foundation spent 2.6 million on everything. The process buys an address for blame, and for a house that plans its engineers as replaceable, that is rational.
Prime Video hit a wall at five per cent of its intended load, put the pieces back into one process, and the bill fell by ninety per cent. Segment went from over 140 services to one, and the test suite went from hours to milliseconds. Netflix never made the journey, serving 400 Gbit/s from a single FreeBSD machine. The road out has an industry behind it; the road back has nobody.
No framework. No build step. Measured live in your browser. Pure CAST Daemon.
The numbers above are measured live in your browser: your connection, your device, no averages. Below is what Google thinks of the result. Lighthouse audits four dimensions: raw speed, semantic accessibility, security and API hygiene, and search engine visibility. Four perfect scores from a self-made Rust binary web server with zero dependencies.
Google Lighthouse. Measured on vivianvoss.net, this site, served by CASTD — an extremely fast self-made and full scale web and content server written in pure Rust with zero dependencies.
