I’m Felipe De Bene — Cloud Architect at AWS by day, and the reason there’s a 2001 Power Mac G5 in a Chicago basement controlling Spotify over the Gopher protocol by night.

This blog is where the two halves meet: the infrastructure and enterprise UNIX I do for a living, and the alternative-computing rabbit holes I fall into for fun. AIX on POWER8. Kubernetes homelabs behind Cloudflare Tunnels. Vintage Macs coaxed into doing modern things they were never designed for. I write it up because explaining the non-sense is how I actually learn the real stuff.

What I build

  • The Gopherverse — modern services delivered over the 1991 Gopher protocol (RFC 1436): Spotify remotes for Mac OS 9, Tiger and Snow Leopard, a native Android Gopher client, a phlog renderer, and a shared Rust core.
  • Chicago ‘L’ trackers — live CTA train positions rendered three ways: a NORAD-style board on Cloudflare Workers, a Rust/ratatui terminal app, and a Unicode-braille Gopher map.
  • Gandula — a text-based Brazilian football manager, with a Rust/WASM engine, a reinforcement-learning agent, and a native Android port.

Whatever the machine needs: Rust · Kotlin · Go · TypeScript · C · Objective-C · Python · Kubernetes · Cloudflare · AWS.

Fun fact: I learned BGP the hard way — by taking 1,400+ branches offline with a single command.

Elsewhere