The Manifesto
Sovereignty, Craft, and Release — the three pillars that hold this whole thing up
My father carved wizards from wood.
Not metaphorically. Steve Tunturi ran The Whittler's Workshop on Highway 101 in Waldport, Oregon, from the 1970s through the 1990s. Dragons. Sorceresses. Wizards with staffs and cloaks and faces that held something — weight, age, a kind of earned knowing. He learned the grain of each piece before he cut it. He knew where the blade would catch, where the wood wanted to split, where a knot would fight him or yield. He couldn't do that work on someone else's material, in someone else's workshop, using tools he didn't own.
He set down his knife in 2006.
This site is built in the year he died. Est. MMVI — not as branding, but as acknowledgment. Every system I build carries that lineage. The wizard energy isn't decoration. It's inherited craft.
I. Sovereignty
The first pillar is sovereignty: your infrastructure answers to you.
I've spent twenty-five years in technology — as a kid billing clients at fourteen, as a business owner at seventeen, as a NOC engineer, a cybersecurity architect, a field responder during some of the largest cyberattacks the United States has faced. I've seen what happens when people and organizations don't control their own infrastructure. I've rebuilt Active Directory and DNS from scratch after 150 servers were encrypted by ransomware. I've watched clients lose years of work to vendor decisions they had no voice in. I've watched products get sunsetted, acquired, pivoted, and killed — along with the workflows built on top of them.
The cloud is a tool. It is not a foundation. When your tools are owned by third parties, your operations are governed by their business model. The service you depend on for your passwords, your communication, your data, your workflow — that service has interests. Those interests are not always yours.
Sovereignty means: your data lives on storage you control, encrypted with keys you hold. Your services run on hardware you can touch. Your stack degrades gracefully when an external service has a bad day. Your infrastructure doesn't depend on a startup's Series C closing.
This is not paranoia. It is engineering discipline. It is what responsible infrastructure looks like.
In 2026, with the web flooding with synthetic content and every "free" service extracting value from you in ways that are increasingly hard to audit, the default assumption that cloud services are safe and neutral is no longer defensible. Own your data. Own your infrastructure. Own your life.
II. Craft
The second pillar is craft: do the work the right way, even when no one would know the difference.
My father didn't cut corners because the customer wouldn't see the back of the piece. The grain had to be right. The finish had to be right. The face of a carved wizard had to hold something real, or it was just wood.
I write 170 tests for an update management system. I implement Ed25519 signing for software distribution, not because my homelabs require enterprise-grade cryptography, but because the architecture should be correct. I document my patterns so that someone else can build on them, understand them, trust them.
Craft means: complete transparency in methods, not just results. If I hand you a key to lock the doors, I hand you the key — I don't just tell you the doors are locked. Open source wherever possible. Auditable code. Honest documentation that explains failure modes alongside success paths.
It also means shipping. My father carved by hand, one piece at a time. A wizard that stayed in the workshop, unfinished, helped nobody. Ship bugs. Fix them. Log everything. Repeat. The craft is not in achieving perfection before release — it's in the iterative discipline of making something real, putting it into the world, and improving it honestly.
This applies to homelab infrastructure the same way. The perfect compose file that you never deploy helps no one. Get the service running. Understand how it breaks. Fix it. Document what you learned.
III. Release
The third pillar is release: build it, then let it go.
Everything here is MIT licensed. Take it. Build on it. Fork it. Make it yours. I don't want your money in exchange for access to the knowledge I've accumulated — I want you to be educated. That's the transaction I'm interested in.
This comes from watching what happens when information is hoarded. In IT, information hoarding creates dependency. It creates mystification — the "wizard" who won't share knowledge because their job security depends on you not understanding what they're doing. I have contempt for that posture. I've always had contempt for it.
Release means: the tools I build are yours to use. The patterns I've documented are yours to adapt. If something I've built improves your situation, ship it, share it, modify it, publish your modifications. The ecosystem grows when people release what they've made.
It also means releasing the need for credit or control. I'll acknowledge lineage — Letta shaped how I thought about persistent agent memory; other projects shaped how I thought about security architecture. Acknowledging where ideas come from isn't weakness, it's honesty. But then you build the next thing and release that too.
The Through-Line
Sovereignty, Craft, Release.
My father carved wizards from wood because that was the form the work took for him. For me, the form is systems — agent runtimes, update managers, encryption protocols, homelab stacks built piece by piece over years. The material is different. The orientation is the same.
You are not a consumer of technology. You are a practitioner of it. Technology should answer to you — your purposes, your values, your control. That requires owning your infrastructure, doing the work well, and sharing what you learn.
Our ancestors would want to know whether our paths were honorable. That question is worth sitting with.
I think it is, as long as we're honest about what we're doing and generous with what we know.
That's what this is for.