Chenborg builds and runs technical stacks made entirely of open source software, hosted on European infrastructure. Jekyll, Redmine, Ruby on Rails, NixOS, WireGuard and pf — designed, deployed and maintained. https://chenborg.com/ 2026-09-09T12:00:00+02:00 Chenhej@chenborg.com © 2026 Chenborg https://chenborg.com/journal/hackathons-and-open-source-culture/ 2026-09-09T12:00:00+02:00 2026-09-09T12:00:00+02:00

Running the event, and the harder part afterwards — turning a good weekend into an organisation that is genuinely comfortable working in the open.

https://chenborg.com/journal/thinkpads-unix-installed/ 2026-09-09T12:00:00+02:00 2026-09-09T12:00:00+02:00

Refurbished ThinkPads arriving with GNU/Linux or BSD already working — every function key, the fingerprint reader, the dock — provisioned from the same repository as your servers.

https://chenborg.com/journal/your-architecture-diagram-belongs-in-the-repository/ 2026-09-09T10:00:00+02:00 2026-09-09T10:00:00+02:00

TALA went open source last week. That is a good excuse to explain why every diagram we hand a client is a text file under version control, and why the ones that are not are always out of date.

https://chenborg.com/services/infrastructure/systems-networks/why-pf/ 2026-09-09T00:00:00+02:00 2026-09-09T00:00:00+02:00

The full case for pf, the OpenBSD packet filter — a firewall ruleset that reads like a sentence, reviewed like code, and small enough for one person to hold in their head.

https://chenborg.com/services/infrastructure/systems-networks/why-wireguard/ 2026-09-09T00:00:00+02:00 2026-09-09T00:00:00+02:00

The full case for WireGuard — a VPN small enough to have actually been audited, fast enough to forget about, and simple enough that public keys are the whole identity model.

https://chenborg.com/services/saas/redmine/why-redmine/ 2026-09-09T00:00:00+02:00 2026-09-09T00:00:00+02:00

The full case for Redmine — no seat licence, your own PostgreSQL, workflows that bend to a regulated process, and twenty years of proof that it does not go away.

https://chenborg.com/services/ai/ollama/why-ollama/ 2026-09-09T00:00:00+02:00 2026-09-09T00:00:00+02:00

The full case for running open-weight models locally with Ollama — jurisdiction, cost and latency — and an honest account of the capability gap you accept.

https://chenborg.com/services/infrastructure/systems-networks/why-nixos/ 2026-09-09T00:00:00+02:00 2026-09-09T00:00:00+02:00

The full case for NixOS — the whole machine as one file, staging that genuinely matches production, and a rollback that is a reboot rather than a rescue.

https://chenborg.com/services/saas/nextcloud/why-nextcloud/ 2026-09-09T00:00:00+02:00 2026-09-09T00:00:00+02:00

The full case for Nextcloud — a European file, calendar and document layer that ends the transfer-impact conversation, and the honest account of what you give up.

https://chenborg.com/services/saas/jekyll/why-jekyll/ 2026-09-09T00:00:00+02:00 2026-09-09T00:00:00+02:00

The full case for building company websites with Jekyll — no runtime, no database, content in Git, and HTML that will still render in 2040.

https://chenborg.com/journal/why-emacs/ 2026-09-09T00:00:00+02:00 2026-09-09T00:00:00+02:00

The case for a forty-year-old editor as the interface to a local language model — programmable all the way down, plain text throughout, and honest about who it suits.

https://chenborg.com/journal/your-website-does-not-need-a-runtime/ 2026-08-19T09:00:00+02:00 2026-08-19T09:00:00+02:00

Every website incident we have been called to clean up had the same shape: something was running that did not need to be.

https://chenborg.com/journal/a-firewall-you-can-read-out-loud/ 2026-07-02T09:00:00+02:00 2026-07-02T09:00:00+02:00

The best measure of a ruleset is whether a new engineer can read it aloud in a meeting and have everyone agree on what it does.

https://chenborg.com/journal/where-your-data-sleeps/ 2026-05-21T09:00:00+02:00 2026-05-21T09:00:00+02:00

Data residency is not the same as data sovereignty, and the difference is usually a clause about who can be compelled to hand over a key.