Well, I am very interested in all kinds of technical stuff, from Hosting/Servers to microcontrollers, networks, BGP and so on.

The Bunker was a vast playground for me. Obviously, there was the data centre part with servers and a lot of network stuff. But you also had a lot of other stuff to play with. I’ve built a system to open the (otherwise manually operated) bunker door over the network. So when someone wants in, you don’t need to walk through the whole complex. Instead, you just need to press a button on your phone.

In general, the whole bunker was connected. Today you probably would describe it as an enormous smart home. The only difference is that the system was like 30-40 years old. So everything was primarily done with straightforward setups, relays, comparators etc. No stupid cloud and proprietary protocols etc. So it was easily possible to integrate it with our own management system.

It was cool to try stuff in productive environments within the network and hosting area. I do work a lot on traffic analysis and DDoS protection stuff. Sure, you can test some stuff in a dedicated development/testing environment, but a lot of other stuff just makes sense to test with actual real-world traffic of a decent size.

So altogether, there was a hell lot of exciting stuff for me to play with, and I always had the freedom to work on whatever I wanted 🙂