mathewstorm.ca
SINCE 2020
Open Source engineer, writer, operator. Humanist-absurdist.
Building open infrastructure in Canada. Writing about digital sovereignty, the systems we live in, and the reasons to continue building.
FEATURED
RECENT WRITING
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PHILOSOPHY Humanist Absurdism Five people who stayed human inside systems they couldn't leave, and why the revolt against a cruel system is forever and for each other.
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POST Digital Sovereignty and the Nation-State I run a Canadian cloud company and I still think tying digital sovereignty solely to the nation-state is dangerous. A country can change, so the thing to build is the exit.
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POST Palantir Has No Place in Canada Canada's special forces have used Palantir's Gotham since 2020, on a sole-sourced contract flagged "not for public disclosure" that could reach $63 million. Write your MP and ask for a plan to get Palantir out.
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PHILOSOPHY My Take on Levinas Keeping Levinas's diagnosis of totality and the face, and grounding the obligation in people instead of in God.
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POST us-east-1: The Bane of Sovereignty A backup client's hardcoded us-east-1 locked out our Canadian storage. S3-compatible tools should let users set the signing region.
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POST Pingora Is My New Best Friend Pingora is Cloudflare's Rust framework for building proxies, and it's a framework, not a library: it runs the proxy and calls your code at fixed points. Here's how to build a pass-through proxy in about thirty lines, then teach it to hold and deny a request.
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POST A Harness of My Own Alberta published 21 white papers on turning an AI agent workforce loose on a 40-year, 466-million-line technical estate. Reading the first two, I found the architecture behind a framework I'd already built.
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POST Building RAG Search for My Docs, Powered by Cohere Semantic search for the Storm Developments guide: Cohere Embed and Rerank over pgvector, the bugs I hit building it, and the cost controls that came out of them.
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POST Storm Pulse: Integrations Storm Pulse manages my S3 nodes and its kernel contains zero S3 knowledge. How a one-person infrastructure company keeps its most privileged code small enough to actually audit.
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POST Grill and Drill with Skill A skill is somebody else's judgment running in your assistant, and it's just markdown. I took Matt Pocock's grill-me, bent it to fit my head, and built the inverse skill, drill, that the original never reached. Read your skills, then make them match your workflow.
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POST Contributing to Garage: Two Pull Requests, Two Ways In I bet my platform on Garage, the open-source S3 engine. So I started fixing it. Two merged pull requests - a one-line CORS fix I needed, and a bulk-delete compatibility fix I went looking for - and what they taught me about owning your tools.
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What Your Pipeline Pulls Move your forge and the next question is where the pipelines run. CI executes your code on top of a stack of other people's, all of it holding the same keys - and a version tag promises far less than it looks like it does. -
POST Quebec Got Privacy Right - Why Law 25 Is My Gold Standard Quebec's Law 25 is the strictest privacy law in Canada, and the standard I hold Storm Buckets to even though PIPEDA is the one I'm held to. Confidentiality by default, readable consent, and the right to walk away with your data.
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PHILOSOPHY My Take on Simone Weil Keeping the moral core of Simone Weil - attention, gravity, the face - and leaving the mysticism out of it.
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POST Why I'm building a Canadian S3 alternative (The 85% problem) Three American firms hold 85% of Canada's public cloud. Storm Buckets is my open, Canadian-hosted, S3-compatible alternative for object storage. -
POST Building a Static Site Generator in Rust Why I rebuilt my personal site as a static site generator in Rust - the Spellbook lineage from Django, compile-time templates with Askama, and hosting the whole thing on my own Storm Buckets.
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A Forge of Your Own GitHub is fracturing, but the more interesting story is what was never there in the first place. The forge layer has an open answer already running 320,000 projects in production. -
POST Lessons from 15 Hours of Downtime Both my providers went down simultaneously because they shared a datacenter one layer below the surface. Layered coupling is the hardest kind to see.
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The Internet Wasn't Inevitable Three layers of infrastructure had to fight to become open: Linux won, Django won, and now the storage layer is being decided. -
POST How Docker Got Me Off DigitalOcean's App Platform I leaned hard on DigitalOcean's App Platform until the bill mattered. Learning Docker cut my costs and forced me to learn the rest of the stack. Six years later it runs everything I build.
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POST Why I Chose Garage for Canadian S3 Storage Garage is the open-source S3 engine I picked for storage on Canadian hardware. Here's a single-node setup behind Caddy, with Obsidian sync as the test client.
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POST Micro: The Terminal Editor Between Nano and Vim Why I switched from nano and vim to Micro for editing config files on VPSes. A terminal text editor with sane keybindings, syntax highlighting, and zero learning curve.
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POST Why My Most Important Code Lives on Forgejo My company's code lives on a Forgejo forge I run on Canadian hardware, not on GitHub. Here's the setup and the branding behind Storm Forge.