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.

This site is where I am restarting an old release-engineering project in public. The lab is the working set: SPARC, POWER, RISC-V, MIPS, Arm, x86, FPGAs, and the ordinary-looking appliances that become interesting when software has to build and ship on them.

The first pass is a baseline. Some pages are researched notes. Some have hardware on the bench. As the project comes back to life, the useful parts should change from “what this thing is” to “what happened when I tried to build, test, package, sign, release, install, and rebuild software on it.”

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.