About Me

Hi — I'm Fabian Sylvester, based in Munich.

Things I like: automation and GitOps, DevOps in general, open source, writing code, and most things with "security" in the name, the IT and OT kind. The newest love is AI. There's always something new in there worth losing a weekend to.

Work-wise I've been round most of the houses: software development, systems engineering, third-level support, a spell as a technical consultant, then head of consulting — strategising over our portfolio and how we delivered it. These days I'm a Lead Cyber Security Architect. The useful part of taking that route is that not much of the stack is a black box to me any more.

What I actually care about is understanding how a thing works. Not rebooting it until it behaves, not pasting the top search result and hoping. It's the slow way round, and no, you can't get to the bottom of everything — and you'll get things wrong on the way. Assumptions sneak in, some of it you just misread. That's fine, as long as you put what you think you know to the test; every wrong guess it catches leaves you a bit less wrong. But there's a real difference between not knowing every detail and not knowing what you're doing.

That kind of poking around needs a home. The xx4h Environment started as ours: somewhere my friends, my family and I could take all of this apart properly. This site is the same idea, pointed at everyone else. Same rules apply: it's a work in progress, I can't always test everything right away, and even a careful test misses a detail now and then. So not everything here will be 100% right, especially the parts that are still moving.

A good chunk of my downtime is a buddy, two laptops and a Biergarten, working out what to nerd on next. Beyond that I'll throw some hoops now and then, play some video games, or head out to travel the world.