Who Am I?

My name is Nate. This is my website and blog. I plan to make blog posts about tech, travel, and maybe the occasional politics and culture.

I'm a software engineer. My primary language is Python. I like building backend systems and working with relational databases.

Tech Stuff

The blogging engine running this website is one of my hobby projects. Like most of my hobby projects, it's half practical, half conceptual art, and half trolling. The interesting thing about this blog engine (called CyberBlvd) is that it runs on CGI using a web server and web framework that I developed, and it outputs HTML 3.2 without any CSS or javascript.

Here are a couple of my open source hobby projects:

• Pisspot -- A modern CGI web framework for Python. Have a read of the Pisspot manifesto for my thoughts on why CGI is due for a comeback. This blog is implemented using Pisspot.
• Trucker -- A modern CGI runner/webserver written in Go. It's a companion to Pisspot. It's running this blog page.
• Creamedcorn -- Creamedcorn is a post-forking WSGI server for Python. As far as I know, it's the only post-forking WSGI server for Python. The implementation is 95% configuration logic and 5% composing components from Python's standard library. It's useful when you want strict per-request isolation but don't want to spawn a whole new process for each request.
• Backwater -- Backwater is a "pull-based TCP proxy for ephemeral, self-registering backends". Think of it as something like uwsgi's fastrouter and subscription server but actively maintained, easy to configure and use, and working at TCP level. It has two fully-compatible implementations-- one as a single Python file using only standard library, and one "high performance" implementation in Rust producing a single statically linked binary.

Most of them are AI coded in my spare time, so there are likely some WTFs in the code bases. I spend all day at work yelling at AI coding agents to clean up their shit code. On evenings and weekends, I try to chill out and just let them go brrr... and spit out code without too much supervision. All of them are released under WTFPL.

Here are a couple of my other hobby projects:

• theaterfi.re -- This is a custom Reddit frontend that serves all data from a local database containing snapshots of Reddit posts/comments. It's a bit PoC-quality right now, and I'm in an on-going battle with scrapers, so it may occasionally be down for maintenance.
• backdatassup.com / kepvodor.com -- Brutally simple image hosting. An implementation of the backdatassup.com/kepvodor.com server using Pisspot is available here.

More About Me

I grew up in Texas. After university, I spent several years working for non-profits, which gave me the opportunity to travel to some of the poorer parts of the world.

In 2015, my wife and I found out that we would soon have a daughter, and I decided that I should make some money, so I switched to working in the private sector. In 2018, we were expecting the birth of our second child, my son, and we decided to move to my wife's home country of Hungary.

Aside from the language being difficult, I'm pretty happy living in Hungary. Our kids are growing up bilingual. The local schools are good. The health care system is free, and, despite how much Hungarians complain about it, I've found it to be high quality.

Outside of work and the tech sphere, I'm a car enthusiast, and I like to participate in amateur rally-raid. I completed the Budapest-Bamako Rally in a Renault Twingo in 2024 and in a Suzuki Swift in 2026. I drove the Swift back home, and I'm planning to use it for smaller local rallies and again for the Budapest-Bamako in 2028.