I work as consultant. By day, I help governments and public institutions navigate the complexity of technology — policy, governance, the hard questions about what it means for public organisations to be sovereign over their own systems.
By night, I build one.
thornbush.nl is where I think out loud about that work. Not the professional kind — the personal kind. The kind where you assemble a server on a kitchen table, make mistakes that cost you an evening, and learn something that no certification course would have taught you.
What I build#
HomeStack is a self-hosted infrastructure stack running on a Raspberry Pi in our home. It replaces Google Photos, cloud storage, a password manager, a wiki, and a handful of other services that used to live in someone else’s data centre. Everything encrypted, everything backed up, everything documented well enough that it could be handed to someone else if it had to be.
What makes it interesting is that I run it alone. Strategist and lead architect when deciding what to build and why. Project manager when breaking it into phases and tracking what’s done. Platform and DevOps engineer when wiring containers together. Security and identity engineer when hardening the stack and managing access. Infrastructure engineer when the backups fail at 3am. And end user — the person who actually has to live with every decision I made in the other roles.
It started as a cost-saving exercise. It became something more interesting: a practical education in the systems that underpin modern digital life, built at a scale where every decision is visible and every mistake is instructive.
Why thornbush#
A thornbush is unglamorous infrastructure. It doesn’t tower. It doesn’t impress. But it holds its ground, it’s hard to uproot, and things tend to grow around it.
That’s roughly what I’m going for.
What you’ll find here#
The moment you rely on something you built yourself — for passwords, photos, files, identity — it becomes production. And production has consequences.
These notes are about what those consequences actually look like. Not the polished retrospective where everything worked out, but the decision made at 11pm that turned into a two-hour debug session. The configuration variable whose name meant the opposite of what it said. The backup that had never been restored until the day it needed to be.
If you work in digital government and think about sovereignty at scale, you’ll find a smaller version of the same problems here. If you’re considering running your own infrastructure, you’ll find an honest account of what it takes. If you’re neither — you’re probably in the wrong place, and that’s fine too.
I write for people who build things and want to understand why they work, not just that they do.