About PlanetJon

Rooted in infrastructure. Focused on security.

You can’t really defend what you don’t understand at a fundamental level. That’s been the guiding principle of my career over three decades of actually building, running, and fixing the networks and servers that keep things online. Not theory from a textbook, but the real stuff.

The early days (1990s)

I helped build independent ISPs from scratch back in the 90s. That meant designing the whole topology, sitting down and negotiating peering deals with Tier-1 providers, and managing routing across hundreds of networks at UK Internet Exchanges. We also did dedicated leased-line connectivity for businesses, which gave me a pretty clear picture of how enterprise traffic actually moves — and where things tend to choke.

Latency and load (and some games)

The early internet wasn’t just routing tables and BGP sessions, though. I also ran multiplayer servers for Quake and Quake 2. It sounds like a side hobby, but it taught me a lot about distributed systems, latency, and how unpredictable real-time networks actually are when users are involved. By the 2000s I’d moved into Linux sysadmin work for hosting providers — hardening production stacks, automating deployments, keeping infrastructure stable at scale.

From ops to security

That operational background naturally led me into cybersecurity. I’m still as passionate about it as ever, but my approach is shaped by years of watching how networks get built, where the blind spots hide, and why security really can’t be bolted on afterward. I share things here because understanding the full stack — from physical cabling through routing protocols to Linux hardening and application-layer stuff — is the only way to build security that actually holds up.

Same approach applies to this site. No tracking scripts, no cookies, no ads — just content. If you’re curious about how things work under the hood, head to the privacy policy.