Building open infrastructure in Canada. I write about digital sovereignty, the systems we live in, and the reasons to keep building.
The boulder may as well be worth pushing. The one I picked is infrastructure you can own, inspect, and walk away from. Storm Developments started from one conviction: the floor your work depends on shouldn't belong to someone who can revoke it, raise the rent, or read it without asking.
Founder of Storm Developments
Canadian cloud infrastructure, built on open source and operated by us.
Storm Buckets - S3-compatible object storage hosted in Canada, built on Garage. Point rclone, the AWS CLI, or Terraform at a bucket and the data stays on Canadian soil.
Storm Pulse - the open source, security-first agent that runs the servers Buckets sits on. Outbound-only, mTLS, HMAC-signed commands, zero listening ports. AGPLv3.
Most of my work has moved to Forgejo, open source forges I run myself. Centralizing my code on a platform I can't leave was always the thing I was arguing against.
- git.stormdevelopments.ca - Storm's forge
- gitforge.ca/Mathew - a public Canadian forge. A small Codeberg, if it grows up.
- git.deuxfleurs.fr/smattymatty - where my Garage contributions land
Anti-extraction, anti-centralization. Refuse the single point of control.
Funny thing: my two favorite OSS projects (Garage, PeerTube), my favorite philosopher (Camus), and my favorite revolution are all French. Refusing concentrated power is, apparently, a French tradition.
But the country that needs it most right now is Canada. Canadian data living on American clouds answers to American law and whoever happens to be running American politics, and that has stopped being a safe assumption. Keeping our infrastructure Canadian is the elbows-up version of all of this: own the floor you stand on before owning it stops being optional.
Nobody hands you meaning, so you build it. Preferably in Rust, on hardware you own.