Middleware Engineer & DevOps Specialist
I'm a middleware engineer/devops, Dad, writer, and digital autonomy advocate based in Brussels. I geek out on politics, technology, information systems, democracy, justice, coercive groups, and discernment.
This site is my personal hub for long-form writing, curated bookmarks, and open-web experiments — where ideas about tech, autonomy, democracy, and digital culture meet. Since February 2026, this site is also my personal ActivityPub instance, every posts you see on this blog can be fetched from the fediverse. Read more →
I was born and grew up inside an authoritarian Tibetan Buddhist hippie community that slowly revealed itself to be a cult. Why am I telling you this? Because once you have lived inside a coercive system, you begin to recognize patterns that others ma...
Every post on this site carries structured AI transparency metadata — visible both to readers (as a disclosure badge) and to machines (as Schema.org JSON-LD). Here’s how I built it, from the post editor to the structured data output. The AI Transpare...
The fediverse and Bluesky are often discussed as competing visions of decentralized social media. ActivityPub is a W3C standard implemented by Mastodon, Misskey, Lemmy, and hundreds of other projects. AT Protocol is Bluesky’s foundation — a different...
This post is a guided tour through the architecture of the system that powers this site. It’s built on Indiekit, an open-source Node.js IndieWeb server created by Paul Robert Lloyd. I forked it because I wanted to change fundamental aspects of how it...
FeedLand is an open-source feed reader and sharing platform created by Dave Winer, the pioneer behind RSS itself. It describes itself as “an ecosystem of feeds, news and people” — a place to subscribe to RSS feeds, organize them, discover what others...
TL;DR : En Occident, le bouddhisme tibétain bénéficie d’une image d’exception morale, perçu comme la “dernière religion pacifique”. Cette idéalisation rend toute critique suspecte et toute parole de victime inconfortable. Pourtant, comme toute tradit...
This blog post (sadly on substack) is truly fascinating :
Two years after the campaign started, in August 2021, China’s Supreme People’s Court, along with the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, officially ruled “996” illegal. It was, as far as I know, the first time that a grassroots, developer-led campaign used open source organizing mechanisms to enforce not just intellectual property norms, but labor rights norms, and ultimately ended in a legal victory.
The first major chapter of the Chinese open source story did not begin with some grand government proclamation or a visionary founder. It started, as most open source stories do, with engineers trying to solve hard problems for their company. This company was Alibaba.
Highlighted days had posts with AI involvement (level 1+). Empty boxes represent days with no AI-involved posts.
2022-02 – Present
Real-time monitoring and analysis platform for open-source intelligence The OSINTukraine initiative is a specialized endeavor dedicated to open-source intelligence (OSINT) pertaining to Ukraine. Its primary objectives are the collection, archiving, translation, analysis, and dissemination of critical information related to the ongoing conflict with Ukraine. Utilizing advanced OSINT techniques, the project offers in-depth insights into current events, potential security threats, and other relevant issues concerning Ukraine. This is achieved by monitoring numerous Russian telegram channels, followed by meticulous filtering, categorization, and archiving of data streams. These efforts are further enhanced by various OSINT analysis projects incubated within the initiative." Current sub-projects War crimes archive Drones research Location related alerts system
2023-01 – Present
Chardons Bleus is a non-profit association created to raise and manage funds so that people victims of the Ogyen Kunzang Chöling cult and its criminal leader Robert Spatz can effectively access the justice system. The association exists to pool resources, cover legal and procedural costs, and provide a collective framework that makes long and complex judicial actions financially possible. It also acts as a point of coordination between contributors, legal representatives, and supporting professionals, with the clear purpose of enabling accountability through lawful proceedings that individuals could not sustain alone.
2002-11 – Present
BuzzWorkers is a long running personal project dedicated to curating, preserving, and publishing independent electronic music and DJ mixes spanning Techno, Electro, Trip Hop, Acid, and related experimental genres from the 1990s to today. Over more than twenty years, I designed, operated, migrated, and maintained the full technical stack behind the platform, evolving alongside the web itself. This included working with multiple generations of hosting, audio tooling, content management systems, databases, automation scripts, streaming and download infrastructures, and more recently federated platforms such as the fediverse and Funkwhale. Beyond music production and curation, the project taught me long term system design, data preservation, platform migration, interoperability, and the tradeoffs between centralized and decentralized architectures, while managing large media collections and making them reliably accessible on the web for community and educational use.
2023-10 – Present
“Skyfleet”, a fleet of thematic and news-oriented Bluesky accounts powered by RSS feeds and FreshRSS, with pages that track their sources and purpose, plus a hand-curated directory of custom feeds with clear inclusion criteria so people can discover active, maintained feeds and share their own
2015-10 – 2022-10
OKCinfo was launched at the end of 2015 as a desperate last minute attempt in a 20 year long existing trial launched by the Belgian state against the OKC cult in 1997. The 23 of us – supported by more than 40 other former OKC-born young children – have since been supported by talented lawyers ready to champion our cause. The Belgian chapter of the justice battle against OKC was concluded in 2022, the pedocriminal Robert Spatz was condemned to a 5 years suspended sentence. The victims decided to engage a new Justice battle in france under the banner of Association Chardons Bleus
interconnect.substack.com
manton.org
mastodon.social