I’m Werner Strydom. For as long as I’ve worked, the job has been the same: apply software engineering to the problem in front of me.

These days the problems sit between teams. I find myself between security, compliance, infrastructure, site reliability, and release engineers, along with technical writers, quality assurance engineers, and whoever else the problem touches, helping them collaborate. Each of those fields has real experts, and I’m not one of them. I’ve had enough exposure to connect the dots through software.

I also keep a lab: old workstations, servers, single-board computers, firewalls, NASes, FPGAs, and other machines that make software assumptions visible. Some of it is practical. Some of it is just a good way to learn where the edges are.

I think by asking questions. Not rhetorical ones, the kind that come from a thought experiment. Why is this happening? Maybe that’s the answer. If it is, what happens when we push on it? This site is where I write the questions down, and occasionally an answer.