Software engineer / multidisciplinary builder

Byte Ashen

I build and take apart software, hardware and infrastructure — from low-level systems to the devices and networks they run on. Engineering that survives contact with reality.

  • C++ and native systems
  • Network engineering
  • Automation-first infrastructure
  • 2D / 3D art

Approach

Low-level curiosity.
Infrastructure-scale thinking.

I care about explicit behaviour, useful observability, and designs that stay sane after the demo is over — whether that demo is a service, a circuit, or a render.

Night forest dissolving left to right into wireframe geometry, the frame continuing down into the moonlit puddle until the water goes black

That scene resolves as it moves right: real trees, then wireframe, then the bare geometry underneath. It is the closest thing I have to a self-portrait — the finished surface and the structure holding it up, in one frame.

Reliability before theatre

The clever solution is worthless when nobody can debug it at 02:00.

Automate repeated pain

Manual steps become documentation, then scripts, then boring infrastructure.

Own the whole path

From code and operating systems through switching, routing and deployment.

Selected work

Shipped, with source you can inspect.

NullFlare Turnstile Solver

A browser extension that handles Cloudflare Turnstile challenges automatically, so development, QA and browser-automation runs stop stalling on a widget. Published on the Chrome Web Store.

1K+users
5.0rating
145KiB
Chrome extension·v1.0.0·No data collected

View on the Web Store

what it removes

before run suite → challenge → wait for a human → continue after run suite → challenge → solved → continue

CDP for C++

A modern C++ library for Chrome DevTools Protocol automation, from quick one-liners to direct protocol control — without dragging in an external runtime or package ecosystem.

Zero external dependencies, thread-safe internals, isolated browser contexts, and three API levels for quick, high-level or raw CDP access. DOM and input automation, screenshots and PDFs, network interception, request mocking, extension loading, concurrent sessions.

C++23·CMake·Windows / Linux·Open source

View repository

quick_start.cpp

#include<cdp/CDP.hpp>auto browser = cdp::quick::launch(); auto page = browser->newPage("https://example.com"); page->waitForSelector("#content"); page->screenshot("page.png");

Stack

Tools backed by actual use.

Grouped by where each one fits in the system.

Languages

  • C++
  • Rust
  • Python
  • Go
  • TypeScript
  • Luau

Systems

  • Linux
  • Bash
  • PowerShell
  • Win32
  • Direct2D

Networking

  • TCP/IP
  • DNS
  • BGP
  • Wireshark
  • Netfilter
  • OPNsense
  • OpenWRT

Infrastructure

  • Proxmox
  • Hyper-V
  • VMware
  • Docker
  • KVM
  • LXC
  • ZFS

Automation

  • Ansible
  • Terraform
  • GitHub Actions
  • Make
  • Git
  • Grafana

Also building

  • Reverse engineering
  • Hardware
  • Protocol design
  • 2D / 3D art

Homelab / infrastructure

A small platform, treated like a real one.

Homelab at night: a server rack, monitors showing systemd output, and a network diagram on a whiteboard

Edge security

OPNsense

Segmentation, policy and visibility at the boundary.

Compute

Proxmox VE

Virtual machines and containers on a managed cluster.

Storage

ZFS-backed NAS

Snapshots, checksums and deliberate backup paths.

Observability

Metrics & logs

Enough context to diagnose failures instead of guessing.

Design principle

N+1 where failure hurts

Redundancy is applied selectively: critical services, storage paths and recoverability get attention before vanity metrics. Documented recovery paths, snapshots plus separate backups, segmented service networks.

Art

The same instinct, away from the terminal.

Character work and environments in Blender. Take it apart, understand it, put it back together better — it turns out that applies to fur and geometry too.

Vanta: a dark grey wolf wearing a glossy black visor with teal glow and metal hardware

Vanta

Groomed fur, hard-surface hardware and a visor that had to read as glass over a face.

Byte: a blue and white wolf with cyan markings

Byte

The one that ended up being the name. Layered coat, guard hairs, and a lot of iterations.

Environment

1.7 million strands, and the geometry under them.

The climb sequence at the top of this page is 144 frames of a wolf on a radio tower, above a cloud deck baked once and reused so the render stayed affordable.

A wolf on a radio tower above a cloud deck, from the opening sequence

Contact

Have a difficult system to untangle?

Projects, infrastructure, networking, or a technically interesting conversation — I'm listening.

Start a conversation