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.