The sovereign engineer
On owning your tools, your keys, your data, and the systems that shape your work. Draft — being rewritten from the actual practice.
Draft. This one is being rewritten from lived practice rather than first principles. The argument stands; the war stories are still being declassified.
There is a version of a software career where every tool is rented, every artifact lives on someone else's server, and every working relationship is mediated by a platform that can revoke it. I spent years doing security work for people — activists, journalists, NGOs — who discovered exactly what that dependency costs, usually at the worst possible moment. Which is to say: this is not an aesthetic position.
So I built the other version, and I run on it daily.
The stack, concretely
- Identity is a keypair, not an account. Every service I run and every agent in my fleet signs with a Nostr identity. The keys for the agents live in Signet, a bunker I wrote precisely so that no agent — and no compromised box — ever holds a raw private key.
- Code review happens on my hardware. Drydock reviews patches with local models; nothing leaves the building. Git collaboration is NIP-34 events on relays I choose.
- Deployment truth is signed events. Bahia publishes what was deployed, by whom, and what is actually running. The audit trail is the transport, not a report generated after the fact.
- The record is replayable. Chartroom, Mnemonic and Arcana keep reference, history and doctrine as events and provenance-tracked documents. Lose any database and the state rebuilds from the log.
The bet
None of this is nostalgia, and none of it requires believing platforms are evil. It is a straightforward wager: signed, portable, boring primitives will still be here in twenty years, and most of what we currently call "the platform" will not. Price the exit before you need it, and the exit costs nothing.
Keys before accounts. Protocols before platforms. Owned before rented.