Work · Chenborg

Nordic logistics group 240 staff · Sweden & Denmark

Off AWS eu-west-1, onto Elastx and Hetzner

Eleven services, three managed databases and a queue nobody had documented. We audited for six weeks, rewrote the estate as NixOS configurations, replaced the managed pieces with PostgreSQL and MinIO, and cut over one service a week with rehearsed rollbacks. The queue turned out to be load-bearing; finding that out cost us a fortnight we had not quoted.

Migration to European hosting →

−61%: Monthly infrastructure spend
0: Unplanned minutes of downtime during cut-over
14 wks: Audit to final decommission

Research institute Public sector · Finland

A WordPress estate replaced by one Jekyll site

Four WordPress installations, sixty-one plugins between them and a standing quarterly patch bill. We modelled the content as Jekyll collections, built a bespoke theme with a WCAG 2.2 AA budget enforced in CI, and gave the communications team a Git-backed editor they took to in an afternoon. The site now builds in eleven seconds and is served from Stockholm.

Jekyll sites & documentation →

38 ms: Median time to first byte
−94%: Hosting and maintenance cost
61 → 0: Plugins requiring quarterly patching

Engineering consultancy 90 staff · Sweden

Jira to Redmine, with fourteen years of history

A seat licence that had tripled in four years, and an archive nobody wanted to lose. We migrated 41,000 issues with numbers, attachments, authors, timestamps and relations preserved, rebuilt the workflows to match how the teams actually work, and put the whole installation in a NixOS module. Backups are restore-tested monthly and the evidence is emailed to the client.

Redmine, hosted properly →

41,000: Issues migrated with history intact
€38k: Annual licence cost removed
1 VM: Runs the whole company's tracker

Medical device manufacturer Regulated · Germany

Local LLMs behind the firewall

The engineering team wanted code assistance; the data protection officer would not sign off on source code leaving the building. We specified a single GPU host, installed Ollama declaratively on NixOS, exposed an OpenAI-compatible endpoint over WireGuard, and indexed the internal document store for retrieval. Frontier-model quality it is not. For summarising, classifying and drafting, nobody has noticed.

Local AI, run properly →

0 bytes: Prompts leaving the perimeter
1 GPU: Serving 70 engineers
4 wks: Specification to sign-off

Municipal utility Public sector · Sweden

A network you can read out loud

Four sites, two data centres and a firewall configuration that had been appended to since 2011. We rebuilt the edge on pf with macros and tables, replaced the vendor VPN with a WireGuard mesh, and put both under normal code review. The ruleset went from 900 lines nobody understood to 140 that a new engineer reads on their first morning.

Infrastructure & networks →

900 → 140: Lines of firewall ruleset
1 file: Describes the whole edge
−100%: Vendor VPN licences

Field services company Utilities · Norway

A hundred handsets that are not a data broker

Technicians in the field needed a rugged, auditable device with no advertising identifier and no automatic cloud sync. We evaluated Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish OS and postmarketOS against their hardware, built a field application against the winning platform, and wrote the fleet provisioning as a Nix flake. The evaluation itself was the most valuable deliverable — two of the three were wrong for their device roster, and the report says why.

112: Handsets in the field
3 → 1: Platforms evaluated, one adopted
10 yrs: Stated support horizon

Public hackathons Sweden · every year since 2015

Ten years of not missing a year

The first was at Linköping Science Park in 2015, two years before Chenborg existed — the events came first and the company grew out of the people who kept running them. Since then, at least one public hackathon a year: format, network that survives eighty laptops, mentors at two in the morning, a code of conduct that is enforced rather than printed, and the Monday-morning work of deciding which projects continue and what gets published. We lend ThinkPads to anyone who arrives without one.

2015: First event, Linköping Science Park
Every year: At least one public hackathon since
0: Years missed

Seven engagements,
described without adjectives.

Off AWS eu-west-1, onto Elastx and Hetzner

A WordPress estate replaced by one Jekyll site

Jira to Redmine, with fourteen years of history

Local LLMs behind the firewall

A network you can read out loud

A hundred handsets that are not a data broker

Ten years of not missing a year

Tell us what you are running.
We will tell you what it should be.

Off AWS eu-west-1, onto Elastx and Hetzner

A WordPress estate replaced by one Jekyll site

Jira to Redmine, with fourteen years of history

Local LLMs behind the firewall

A network you can read out loud

A hundred handsets that are not a data broker

Ten years of not missing a year

Tell us what you are running.We will tell you what it should be.

Tell us what you are running.
We will tell you what it should be.