Welcome to bashburn — where I try to make sense of the technologies we’re building, who they actually serve, and whether any of this is helping us build a more equitable world (spoiler: it’s complicated).

This site exists because I have opinions about systems engineering, digital ethics, and the frankly wild power dynamics embedded in our infrastructure, and apparently I think the internet needs to hear them. You’ll find everything from deep technical dives into observability tooling to me getting way too philosophical about whether Kubernetes is accidentally a metaphor for late-stage capitalism.

Why “bashburn”?

It’s my Unix username — a mashup of my name, Brian Ashburn — which is about as creative as you’d expect from someone who names variables temp and calls it good. But honestly, there’s something fitting about it. The shell is this beautifully direct interface where you can either accomplish incredible things or completely destroy your system with a misplaced rm -rf, and that kind of sums up how I feel about most technology: powerful, potentially awesome, definitely capable of burning everything down if we’re not paying attention.

What I Actually Write About

Look, I’m going to be real with you — this is basically me working through my thoughts on technology, power, and whether we can build systems that don’t suck for regular people. The topics tend to rotate based on whatever I’m obsessing over that week, but here’s the general landscape:

Software Infrastructure & Tooling: Kubernetes, observability stacks (Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry), CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code. I’m legit passionate about reproducible, automated systems, partly because I’m lazy and partly because manual processes are where human bias and exclusion tend to creep in.

Programming & Architecture: Engineering patterns in Go, Python, and Rust, system design that doesn’t make you want to quit programming, and practical debugging techniques. I have Strong Opinions about code organization, and I’m not sorry about it.

AI & Generative Systems: Local LLMs, multimodal frameworks, and agentic architectures. I’ve been experimenting with everything from Hugging Face Transformers to custom orchestration pipelines, mostly because I’m fascinated by the potential for democratizing creative tools — and deeply concerned about who’s controlling the big models.

Philosophy of Technology: The ethics embedded in system design, what it means when AI becomes a creative collaborator, and the uncomfortable questions about who bears responsibility when our automated systems mess up (or work exactly as designed, which is sometimes worse).

Politics & Digital Power: Not partisan politics — structural politics. Who controls the infrastructure? Who profits from our data? Who gets excluded from the systems we build? These aren’t abstract questions when you’re designing APIs or choosing cloud providers.

Creative Systems Engineering: Notes from building procedural narrative engines, game systems, and media pipelines that try to blend artistic expression with logical systems. It’s messier than it sounds, and way more interesting.

The Broader Ecosystem (Or: My Attempt at World Domination)

This blog is part of what I’m generously calling an “ecosystem” but is probably more accurately described as “several interconnected projects that make sense to exactly one person”:

Valesor Development (valesor.dev) is where I build open-source tooling and automation platforms. It’s the technical foundation for everything else, and my attempt to create infrastructure that prioritizes transparency and user agency over vendor lock-in.

Solo7 Productions (solo7productions.com) is my creative studio where I make music, video, and visual art under the Solo7 brand (solo7.media). It’s where I get to pretend I’m an artist while secretly just engineering creative workflows.

System 9 Studios (system9.studio) is the delivery mechanism — a studio framework that combines storytelling and interactive media with modern AI and procedural workflows. It’s ambitious, probably overcomplicated, and exactly the kind of project that makes perfect sense at 2 AM.

The plan is to release most of this as an open-source creative infrastructure stack, because honestly, the tools for independent creators are either expensive as hell or controlled by massive corporations, and that seems like a problem we could solve if we actually tried.

Who This Is For

bashburn isn’t built for engagement metrics or newsletter subscriptions. It’s built for people who think deeply about the tools they use, who see technology as inherently political, and who believe we can build better systems if we’re intentional about it.

If you’re the kind of person who gets excited about elegant CLI interfaces, writes code with purpose rather than just getting it to work, or wants to explore how modern tooling could serve human flourishing instead of just extracting value from it — you’ll probably find something useful here.

Also, if you’ve ever looked at a distributed system and thought “this is either going to change the world or break it,” we’re probably going to get along.

What’s Coming Up

In upcoming posts, I’ll be diving into building a full-stack observability platform for creative workflows, exploring the ethics of AI-driven storytelling (spoiler: it’s complicated), breaking down the technical architecture of the platform I’m building for audio/video/game development, and documenting my experiments with local LLMs and agent-based systems that don’t require selling your soul to OpenAI.

Thanks for being here. Let’s see what we can build together.

— Brian Ashburn (bashburn)