Chief Architect · Real-Time & Distributed Systems · Founder
Christopher Olsen
Nearly three decades building software from bare metal to cloud-native — founder of two companies, architect of platforms at scale, now building AI-native engineering systems. I approach every problem with a founder's ownership: find what's broken, design the fix, ship it.
~/projects/replikate
syncing ConfigMaps & Secrets across every namespace
247 lines · BSD-licensed
"boring enough to trust in production"
uBix Vault, Beta 11 — The Last Gate I Can Build Myself
Beta 11 adds cloud-KMS and HSM auto-unseal — without a single provider SDK in the vault. With it, every engineering gate on the road to 1.0 has landed. What's left is the one gate I can't build myself: an outside security review.
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Replikate 1.2 — Two Hubs, One Spoke, No Fights
1.1 taught Replikate to cross clusters. 1.2 is the unglamorous follow-up that makes it safe to lean on: two hubs can target the same spoke without eating each other's copies, the self-cluster guard is now proof against URL trickery, and a freshly-registered spoke fans out at once.
uBix Vault, Beta 9 — Making It Durable
The feature list has been done for a while. Beta 9 is about the thing that actually gates running a secrets manager for real: durable storage. uBix Vault can now live in a database instead of on one node's disk — plus live unseal-share rotation and scheduled backups. Still one dependency.
Replikate 1.1 — Now It Crosses Clusters
When I cut Replikate 1.0 I froze the annotation contract and promised the big follow-up — cross-cluster replication — would arrive as an addition that broke nothing. 1.1 delivers it: annotate a source with target-clusters and it replicates into other clusters, proven end to end against two real API servers.
uBix Vault, Beta 8 — Transit, or: Signing Without a Library
Beta 7 gave uBix Vault a way to authenticate anything. Beta 8 turns its Transit engine into full crypto-as-a-service — sign, verify, HMAC, data keys, rewrap — plus single-use response wrapping. All of it standard-library, still essentially one dependency.
uBix Vault, Beta 7 — A Full Auth Suite, and Its Own CA
The last uBix Vault post ended with a service running on my own cluster. Four betas later it can authenticate almost anything — AppRole, Kubernetes, username/password, and now JWT/OIDC — and it can be its own certificate authority. All of it still stdlib-only, still essentially one dependency.
Half a Kilo Down, Thirty Grams Up
AirDropt is a hexacopter that hovers over a spot your friend pinned in their back yard and lowers a package on a line. Nothing about the technology is novel — ArduPilot has done winch delivery for years. What's interesting is the reasoning, including a load case I had backwards.
uBix Vault, Beta 3 — Running It on My Own Cluster, With a Console
The last post was about uBix Vault becoming a working beta. This one is about making it real: a Helm chart, multi-arch images, an admin console, metrics, rate limiting — and deploying it onto my own Kubernetes cluster. Two betas of operational work, and the lockout bug I almost shipped.
Three Bugs in a SID Chip, and What the Die Photographs Told Me
The 8-Bit Machine v0.35.0 fixes hard sync, the filter cutoff curve, and resonance in its MOS 6581 emulation — and adds a 6581/8580 selector. Every fix came from reading how the real chip was reverse-engineered.