About me

Too many things interest me—and that is probably the point. I like to understand how things work, take them apart, improve them, and build something of my own.

I am Alexandre Lamberty: a builder, developer, designer, computer hobbyist, reader, and *nix enthusiast from Belgium.

This website is my personal corner of the internet. It is where I present the things I make, document what I learn, and connect ideas that do not always fit neatly into a single category. Some projects begin as practical tools, others as experiments, and a few simply exist because I wanted to know whether I could build them.

What ties them together is curiosity—and the pleasure of turning an idea into something real.

I have always made things

Long before I wrote code, I was drawing, painting, cutting cardboard, assembling model kits, and making a glorious mess with glue and paint. I painted the miniatures from HeroQuest and Space Crusade, experimented with traditional art and 3D design, and developed an early fascination with anything that could be imagined and constructed.

That instinct never disappeared. The materials simply expanded: wood, soil, pixels, code, networks, servers, and data.

I do not see design, programming, infrastructure, gardening, or woodworking as entirely separate activities. They all begin with the same questions: What am I trying to create? How should the parts work together? Can it be simpler, clearer, or more durable?

From a 486 to the early web

My story with computers began in 1994 with an Olivetti 486 DX2-66: a 66 MHz processor, 8 MB of RAM, and Windows 3.1. A few months later, thanks to my father, I received a copy of Windows 95. Reinstalling that machine was the moment everything truly started.

Then came dial-up internet through a 14.4k modem. It was slow, noisy, and extraordinary. The web felt like a new continent waiting to be explored—the era of AltaVista, Angelfire, personal homepages, and a much smaller, stranger internet.

I soon wanted to make pages of my own. I learned HTML and CSS, first with tools such as Microsoft FrontPage, while also discovering Photoshop, Illustrator, 3D Studio Max, and digital design. The web was not only something to browse; it was something ordinary people could shape themselves. That idea has stayed with me ever since.

Flash, ActionScript, and learning through communities

When Macromedia Flash appeared, I fell in love with it. It brought animation, graphics, interaction, and programming into the same environment. ActionScript became my first programming language and opened the door to software development.

In the early 2000s, I became a moderator on the French Flash community Mediabox, which later became Ziggourat. It was a lively period: Flash grew into an ecosystem around ActionScript 3, Flex, and AIR, and I gradually explored Java, PHP, and MySQL alongside it.

At the same time, I was studying advertising, working with design and traditional art, learning 3D, and becoming increasingly absorbed by computer science. Most of what I know has grown from that pattern: learn by experimenting, exchange knowledge with others, build something, break it, understand why, and try again.

What I build today

My interests now extend across software development, Linux, networking, infrastructure, databases, automation, security, the web, and artificial intelligence. I am especially drawn to the invisible systems underneath applications: how machines communicate, how data is structured, how services remain reliable, and how a collection of components becomes a coherent platform.

A large part of my current work happens in my homelab. It is both useful infrastructure and a permanent learning environment, built around technologies such as Proxmox, Docker, GNU/Linux, Traefik, Forgejo, OpenBao, PostgreSQL, Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki. I manage much of it as code with OpenTofu and Ansible, and use it to explore high availability, monitoring, backups, identity, secrets management, networking, and self-hosted services.

I also build applications and tools, often with Go, JavaScript or TypeScript, React, and PostgreSQL. My projects range from practical personal software to experiments involving knowledge systems, home automation, infrastructure management, and controlled AI agents.

I enjoy the full path from an initial sketch to a working system: defining the problem, modelling the data, designing the interface, writing the code, deploying it, observing it, and refining it.

Computers, GNU/Linux, and a workspace of my own

GNU/Linux is where I feel at home. My computers run Debian, with a deliberately simple environment built around i3, Alacritty, tmux, Zsh, Neovim, and a collection of small scripts. I also use Visual Studio Code when it suits the project.

I prefer tools that are understandable, composable, and mine to configure. A plain-text file that can be searched, versioned, transformed, and backed up is often more valuable to me than an opaque service. This is why Git, Markdown, shell scripts, and self-hosted systems occupy such an important place in the way I work.

My configurations are not static. They evolve with me, and automating them is part of the pleasure. You can explore my dotfiles on GitHub for a closer look at my working environment.

The principles behind my projects

I care about data ownership, open technologies, and systems that remain understandable over time. I like automation, but not automation that hides what it is doing. I want tools to assist people without taking control away from them—especially when artificial intelligence is involved.

My ideal systems are calm, observable, reversible, and built from components with clear responsibilities. They should help rather than distract, preserve knowledge rather than lock it away, and leave room for the person using them to decide.

That is also why I still believe in personal websites. A personal site is not a profile borrowed from a platform. It is a place with its own structure, history, and voice: a small part of the web that you genuinely own.

Beyond the screen

Computers occupy a large part of my life, but not all of it. I read widely, particularly philosophy, psychology, human behaviour, science, physics, biology, mechanics, space, and astronomy. I enjoy drawing, photography, woodworking, gardening, cooking, and long walks through the countryside.

These interests continually feed one another. Gardening teaches patience and observation. Craft teaches respect for materials. Philosophy changes the questions I ask. Science reveals how much remains to be understood. Technology gives me another medium through which to explore all of it.

Around this website

This site is the centre of my personal web presence: a place for selected projects, experiments, and the occasional unfinished idea worth sharing.

• I publish technical articles on articles.alexandrelamberty.com.
• I maintain more detailed working notes at notes.alexandrelamberty.com.
• My code and open projects live on GitHub.

Everything here is part portfolio, part notebook, and part workshop. It will never be completely finished—and I would not want it to be.