Hi, I'm Brett

Marketing guru by day, FOSS dev by night.

Category: projects

  • Building a CDN control plane that doesn’t make you want to close your laptop

    Managing reverse proxy routes by hand is fine when you have five of them. It’s less fine when you have a few hundred and someone on your team fat-fingers a backend URL at 2am. At some point you stop editing config files and start building a panel. This is that panel. The problem If you’ve…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Faster and Faster: Speeding up CDN Hosts

    After my previous blog post on the CDN for media server applications, I’ve started to run into bottlenecks that result in worse performance sometimes, resulting in a huge investigation into what is slowing us down across the board. I’ve just started scratching the surface on what can be done to improve speeds to assorted parts…

  • 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,…

  • Building a Better CDN

    Over the many years that I’ve been self-hosting my own media, I’ve had a few issues, some of which include peering from a relatively cheap storage provider in the EU to Toronto. While both Germany and Toronto have major internet exchanges fairly close by, there’s nothing quite like getting content closer to the edge.