Linux • Cloud • Security • Architecture

Nate Thompson

Techie, tinkerer, and Systems Architect who lives in the terminal.

About

Hi 👋, I’m Nate

I’m a Systems Architect who spends most of my time at the intersection of:

  • Linux and *nix tooling
  • Cloud infrastructure (especially AWS)
  • Security, compliance, and “how do we make this safe but still usable?”
  • Homelab tinkering and experimentation

I enjoy designing systems that are boring in the reliability sense and interesting in the “this is actually well thought out” sense.

What I work on

A few recurring themes in my day-to-day work and personal projects:

  • Architecture & DevOps – multi-account AWS setups, Transit Gateways, VPC design, CI/CD, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform / Terragrunt).
  • Security & Compliance – mapping the real world to frameworks like NIST 800-171 / CMMC and actually gathering evidence instead of hand-waving.
  • Homelab & Experimentation – Proxmox, diverse flavors of Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Kubernetes, Vault, and various self-hosted services that keep me honest about how things really behave under load, failure, or misconfiguration.
  • AI & Automation – exploring how large language models and tooling can augment architecture design, documentation, and day-to-day operations.

This site is where I collect notes, experiments, and patterns that seem worth sharing.

What you’ll find here

Most posts will fall into one (or more) of these buckets:

  • Deep dives into specific problems I’ve had to solve.
  • Reference notes that future-me (and maybe you) will be glad exist.
  • Tradeoff discussions — not just what to do, but why, and what you give up along the way.
  • Homelab logs when something breaks in an “interesting” way.

If a post helps you avoid a rabbit hole or inspires a better design in your own environment, that’s a win.

How I use this site

This site doubles as:

  • A public notebook – so I can link back to posts instead of re-explaining things from scratch.
  • A place to think out loud about patterns, architectures, and tools.
  • A way to document experiments in a way that’s useful to others, not just to me.

It’s intentionally opinionated, and occasionally I’ll change my mind in public when new data or better approaches come along.

I’m not perfect, and I don’t claim to have all the answers (or even some of them 😀) — but I do aim to share what I’ve learned along the way.

Elsewhere

If you’d like to connect, head over to the Contact page for how to reach me.