I’m an infrastructure engineer. Twenty years of it, mostly in government technology and security — the unglamorous kind of work where the systems have to keep running and nobody writes a case study about it afterward.
North Engineer is where I write things down.
Why this site exists
Most of what I’ve learned in this field came from someone else bothering to write it down. Not documentation — documentation tells you what the settings are. I mean the other thing: someone explaining what actually happened when they ran the thing for six months, what broke, and what they’d do differently.
That kind of writing is getting harder to find. The communities around the tools I care about have moved into places that forget. A good answer posted in Discord at 11pm is gone by morning. A hard-won configuration detail buried in a forum thread is unfindable in a year.
So the job here is narrow and specific: be the durable written record for tools whose communities live in ephemeral places. If a post here is still useful in eighteen months, it worked.
What I write about
Six things, and one argument running through all of them.
- MeshCore — off-grid LoRa mesh networking. Firmware, radio profiles, repeaters, and the network people are actually building.
- Linux — specifically Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS. Not desktop, not distro comparisons.
- Networking — Ubiquiti UniFi in practice, including where the walled garden starts to cost you.
- Claude — using AI on real infrastructure and publishing work. The workflows, the costs, and the parts that don’t work.
- Obsidian — plain-text knowledge work, treated as infrastructure rather than productivity theater.
- RSS — feed readers and the case for owning what reaches you.
The argument underneath: open formats and open protocols are a risk decision, not a preference. Markdown outlives the app that edited it. A protocol you can read outlives the company that shipped it. That’s not ideology — it’s the same reasoning that makes you keep a backup.
How this is written
I should be straightforward about this, because it affects how you should read what’s here.
Some posts on this site are researched and drafted with Claude, then reviewed and edited by me before publishing. Those posts say so, at the bottom, every time. They synthesize public sources and community discussion — and every claim in them is linked to a source you can go check yourself.
Other posts are mine start to finish, written from things I’ve actually run and broken. Those speak in first person about first-hand experience.
The line between the two is never blurred. A drafted post will never claim I deployed something I didn’t. If it says “I ran this,” I ran it.
I’m doing it this way for a practical reason: I have a demanding job, kids, and a house, and the alternative was continuing to not write anything at all. The research is machine-assisted. The judgment, the editing, and the decision to publish are mine. If that trade-off isn’t one you want to read, I understand — and the sources are all listed either way, so you can skip me entirely and go to the primary material.
What I’m not
Not an authority. Not comprehensive. Not neutral about everything — I’ll tell you when I have a preference and why.
I get things wrong. When I do and someone tells me, I fix the post and say what changed rather than quietly editing it.
There are no ads here, no affiliate links, no analytics building a profile of you, and no algorithm deciding what you see. There’s a feed, which is the only honest way to follow a website.
Everything here is drawn from my own projects and research. It’s not professional advice — check it against your own situation before you act on it.
Contact
I go by North Engineer rather than my legal name — a boundary between the work I do for a living and the work I publish. It’s not a secret identity, just a separation.
If you’ve run into something I’ve written about and your experience differs, I’d like to hear it. Corrections especially.
the@north.engineer https://north.engineer
Notes from the field, not professional advice. Find your own true north.