I like building infrastructure, mostly so I can break it again.

I'm an IT Security bachelor's student and CTO at Nerd Force1 UG. I run self-hosted systems, container platforms, and internal services — usually at scale.

Most of my time goes into:

• Running container-heavy infrastructures
• Automating everything that shouldn't be done twice
• Designing systems that survive bad ideas and worse deployments

I'm CTO at Nerd Force1 UG (AI-Gruppe), with hands-on experience in designing, deploying, and operating production infrastructure since 2022. My work spans from bare-metal server architecture to container orchestration, automation pipelines and full-stack internal tooling.

Current Infrastructure:

• 🐳 Docker standalone cluster managing:
• ☸️ Kubernetes cluster for orchestrated workloads
• 💾 Ceph storage cluster for distributed data
• 🌐 Internal network architecture (NetBird overlay mesh, Bind9 DNS)

I specialize in containerization and infrastructure automation, building scalable systems.

Applications that I maintain include:

I designed and maintain our company's internal platform — a full-stack application that centralized operations and replaced multiple external tools:

Features: Internal messenger · Time tracking · Ticket system · Accounting · Docker registry frontend · DNS management · VPN management · Hosting orchestration

Tech Stack: Angular frontend · FastAPI backend · MySQL/InfluxDB · Celery workers

I work across the full infrastructure lifecycle — from architecture design to deployment and day-2 operations.

Container Orchestration: Docker (expert) · Kubernetes
Infrastructure as Code: Ansible · Terraform · Kubernetes manifests
CI/CD: GitHub Actions · ArgoCD · Jenkins · Portainer
Storage & Networking: Ceph distributed storage · NetBird · Bind9 DNS

I build internal services, APIs, and tooling to support infrastructure operations.

Backend: Python · C/C++
Frontend: Angular
Systems: Linux (Debain · Arch)
Automations/Pipelines: Ansible · Terraform · Bash · Python · C/C++

Current side projects include an AI companion and various CLI tools for infrastructure management.

I write things down after learning them the expensive way — mostly infrastructure, mostly after something broke. It all lives at philipptheserver.com.

• A host you cannot rebuild is not running — infrastructure as code, and the discipline that makes it mean something
• Kubernetes, and when it earns its place — not a better Docker, a different bargain
• Ceph without a vendor's price list — storage you can afford, and the four things that will bite you
• Alert on symptoms, not on metrics — the outages nobody catches are the ones where every metric is green
• An overlay mesh, and the DNS trap underneath it — NetBird, and how internal names quietly resolve somewhere else
• One login instead of twelve — self-hosted identity, argued from offboarding
• Running the models yourself — self-hosted inference, honest benchmarks, agents near production
• OpenTaberna, and writing the wiki first — documentation as a repository

There is an Atom feed, and the whole site as one file for language models at /llms.txt.

Managing Director · Open Skunkforce e.V.
I lead a small developer team and coordinate open-source initiatives. Once a year we host the embo++ and KiCon conferences in Germany - Bochum.

🔗 github.com/skunkforce

I'm currently focused on large-scale infrastructure design. I want to learn how to design and build data centers from scratch.

(Yes, I want to build a huge datacenter — and no, I have no idea how much of a pain it is going to be. But it is going to be a fun challenge anyways.)

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