SelfHosting

Not my proudest work, but I needed a quick shell script. I’ve been diving deeper into Matrix bridges lately — those connectors that let Matrix users communicate with other platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, and more. In doing so, I’ve learned a lot about how these bridges are built, deployed, and maintained. The twist? I’m running everything on OpenBSD. Running -current on OpenBSD is great, but it does mean I often need to compile packages faster than the official release cycle provides. That’s where this little helper script came in — a quick way to clone, patch, and compile the Go-based Matrix bridges so they run cleanly on my OpenBSD systems. ...

Why I stopped using Discord for open source and how I bridged IRC into Matrix using Heisenbridge on OpenBSD.

Living out in the boonies has its charms: quiet nights, open skies, and an estate that keeps me busy, but internet choices aren’t one of them. Options are slim, and Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT) makes life rough if you want to self-host. Static, routable IPs are what you really need, but out here that’s a luxury. I didn’t want to rely on Cloudflare tunnels, ngrok, or similar middlemen. For a while, I leaned on Tailscale as a DIY SD-WAN (basically a secure mesh network overlay across your devices). It’s great, but not every service or device plays nicely over it. ...