I'm Daniel McDonnell — a Computer Science graduate from Dublin with a background that spans software development, IT operations, and infrastructure engineering. I've been building things on the side since before I graduated, and the habit never really went away.
My work covers the full stack. Frontend interfaces, backend APIs, Android apps in Kotlin, infrastructure automation — I like the parts most people avoid. The closer to the metal, the better. I learn by building.
Outside of professional work I run a 50-phase personal infrastructure project: replacing every cloud service I rely on with something I own and operate myself. Email, files, passwords, media, AI, Git, monitoring — all running on my own hardware. It's the best ongoing education I've ever given myself.
This site is the record. Not a pitch — just an honest log of what I've built, where I'm at, and what's next.
Front to back, browser to bare metal. I write code and ship it on infrastructure I own.
Everything here is real, running, and built by me.
One laptop. 29 containers. 22 public domains. Zero cloud subscriptions. Everything runs on hardware I own.
I got into this because I wanted to understand how things work — not just use them. The best way I found to do that was to build them myself, on hardware I already had.
That mindset shapes everything. When I want to learn something, I build a version of it. When I rely on a service, I figure out if I can run it myself. Not out of distrust — out of curiosity. There's a satisfaction in knowing that a thing works because you made it work, and you could fix it if it broke.
Somewhere in here, PewDiePie is partly responsible. Watch someone obsessively document a thing long enough and you think — that's the whole strategy. Show up, keep building, let the work accumulate.
Build a working version of every major platform — not to compete, but because there is no better way to understand a system than to build it from scratch.
Facebook. Spotify. Gmail. YouTube. Uber. Tick every box.
Open to new opportunities in software development, IT operations, and infrastructure engineering. The fastest way to reach me is LinkedIn.
View my LinkedIn profile →