Background
I’m Yann. Cloud and Cybersecurity engineer, Paris-based, finishing an apprenticeship at France’s Ministry of Armed Forces. By day, edge devices and a small FabLab. By night, a homelab for friends and family.
This site exists because I write more than I publish, and I wanted a place that wouldn’t disappear if a company decided so.
What I believe
I keep coming back to a line Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1755: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither.” I read it in tech terms now.
The trade we keep being offered is ownership for simplicity. Don’t bother with your own files, your own server, your own identity, your own software. Someone else will hold it for you, manage it for you, optimize it for you. It’s easier. It’s nicer. Until they shut down, or change the rules, or decide your account doesn’t deserve to exist anymore.
The bet I’m making is that simplicity at the cost of ownership is not really simplicity. It’s outsourcing. And outsourcing your essentials is not a choice you can take back when you need to.
These aren’t dogma: open-source code, self-hosted infrastructure, hardware that doesn’t fight you when you want to actually use it. Just a refusal to pretend the trade isn’t being made.
How I got here
The path didn’t start with code. At fourteen, I helped organize a small photo exhibition at my school, about tolerance and openness. A few years later, I spent close to two years as a UNICEF Young Ambassador, helping run small events and talks. None of it was grand, and I won’t pretend I had it figured out. But somewhere in there, I picked up that showing up matters more than getting it right.
The technical part came later. I joined an engineering school because I wanted tools that match the size of the problems I care about. I started with rovers and Fablabs and embedded systems. I kept going because every layer I learned felt like a way to be useful at a different scale.
The self-hosting, the open source, the homelab for my family: this is the same thread. Better tools, smaller dependencies, more agency for the people around me. None of it is heroic. It’s just choosing where to put my hands, every day, in the time I have.
If you take one thing from this site, I hope it’s that small choices add up. Most of what gets better in the world gets better because someone, quietly, decided to keep at it. I’d like to be one of those people. I hope you do too.
Reach out
If you want to write, yann.vidamment@libresoftware.cloud is the address I read on my own time. Replies can take a day or two; they tend to come.
For code, git.libresoftware.cloud/morgan is where my daily work lives. github.com/MorganKryze is the public alternative. Issues on either reach me.