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Current Projects
I’m a Media, Information and Technoculture graduate from Western University with a background spanning content marketing, video production, and open-source infrastructure. I enjoy working across disciplines — whether that’s crafting campaigns for technical buyers or tuning Linux kernels for production traffic. HJV Equipment — Content & Marketing Specialist Since April 2023, I’ve been running content…
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Past Projects
Before joining HJV Equipment, I built a varied foundation across video production, research, web development, and community operations. Hive Media Group — Video Producer Assistant (Sept 2021 – June 2022) My introduction to professional content production. I worked across a range of projects in a team environment — editing videos, contributing to pitch meetings, scripting,…
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Tuning a Ceph cluster for high-throughput workloads
A default Ceph install gets you a working cluster, not a fast one. This is the full tuning playbook I use in production: kernel network parameters, TCP stack hardening, CPU governor and idle state management, and route initialization. The kind of changes that make a measurable difference under real workloads. Why defaults fall short Out…
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Stop Exposing Your Homelab: Build a Private Edge with Tailscale, Swizzin, and Docker
At some point, your setup stops being “a server” and starts being a system. That’s usually when things get weird. I hit that point running a hybrid Swizzin + Docker stack. So I stopped trying to fix Docker. And replaced the network instead. The problem nobody talks about Most people build stacks like this: Then…
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Reverse Engineering the Apple Sports API
Apple Sports is fast. Like, annoyingly fast. If you’ve ever had your phone buzz a score update before the broadcast showed it, you know what I mean. That kind of latency implies something purpose-built, so I pointed mitmproxy at it. Here’s what I found. The Setup Standard intercept setup: route iPhone traffic through mitmproxy on…
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Automating the Edge: The Part Nobody Sees
If you read the last post, you saw the fun parts. OpenResty routing requests.Redis acting as a control plane.Traffic getting pushed closer to the edge so it actually feels fast. That’s the part people like to talk about. This is the part that makes it work. The problem you only notice at 2am At some…
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Securing a CDN That Grew Up
If you’ve been following along, you might remember my posts about building a CDN for self-hosted media — NGINX, Route53 geolocation, getting Plex posters closer to the edge without paying Cloudflare a fortune. Since then, things got a little out of hand. The project changed hands, grew considerably, and last year we pushed nearly 100PB…
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Lua, Redis, and the Art of Never Reloading Nginx
If you’ve been following along, you’ll know I’ve been on a bit of a journey with CDN infrastructure. From Building a Better CDN to speeding things up to playing with gRPC. This time around, the whole thing got torn down and rebuilt from scratch. The goal: a reverse proxy where I never have to touch…
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Smarter DNS Routing with AWS Route 53 Traffic Policies
If you’ve been following along with the CDN series, you’ll know I’ve been running a multi-node setup across a bunch of providers to get content closer to users. The next natural step was making the DNS layer smarter, not just round-robining across all nodes, but actually sending traffic to the right place based on where…
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You, Me, & gRPC
gRPC you say? Think of grpc_pass as proxy_pass’ faster, cooler cousin. grpc is able to carry http2 traffic as an ingest point for connections… Upon discovering this, I ended up making some adaptations to our previous project the Plex CDN. gRPC essentially has a bunch of interesting blocks (mostly due to the way that they’re…
Hi, I'm Brett
Marketing guru by day, FOSS dev by night.