Justin Challenger · Platform engineering · Burlington, ON
That's the pitch. I design AI orchestration, automation, and self-hosted platforms the same way — production-grade, human-gated, auditable end to end.
▲ live topology — you are here
01 · What I build
Crews of LLM agents with human approval gates — I run five in production, around the clock, on my own cluster.
APIs and services composed into event-driven workflows that remove manual steps — the kind that took an intake process from eight days to under one.
Production infrastructure on your own hardware — privacy, control, and resilience as design constraints. I run 50+ services this way.
Bots, webhooks, and API bridges that keep people and systems in the same conversation — my agents post their standups to Discord twice a day.
02 · How systems grow
Scroll to watch a single-page application become a multi-service platform — the same progression I design for deliberately: separation of concerns, a dedicated data tier, focused services, an orchestrated network, replication that survives node loss, and a delivery pipeline that ships it all. Each stage is annotated with a company that famously lived it.
00 · SINGLE-PAGE APP
One page, one deploy — everything lives in the browser.
Instagram launched this way in 2010 — a Django monolith that reached 14M users with three engineers.
Architecture is only half the story. The other half is who builds it — and how that group grows.
03 · How teams grow
Step from a solo developer shipping straight to production, through review gates, squads with real ownership, release engineering, and change management — to governance enforced by the pipeline itself. It's the human architecture I've built and led inside, from startup pace to enterprise scale.
00 · SOLO DEV
One person, full context. Commit, deploy, done — the pipeline is muscle memory.
Linux began as one developer: Linus Torvalds posted v0.01 himself in 1991.
04 · The toolkit
Hover to inspect · click a module to expand its parts.
05 · The physical substrate
A 3-node Proxmox cluster with deliberately asymmetric roles: a Dell R720 workhorse carries all the compute, an edge box holds only the network control plane — so the network survives the compute host going dark — and a Raspberry Pi casts the tie-breaker quorum vote while running Pi-hole DNS for the LAN. One $50 Pi; two real jobs.
Hover to inspect · click a node to expand its parts. Hover a hypervisor header or the Pi to see the quorum ring.
06 · How systems flow
INTAKE — Work enters as cards, briefs, and events.
07 · Selected projects
Five always-on LLM agents that pull work from a kanban board, run standups, and open pull requests — a human holds the merge button.
Production infrastructure running 50+ services on 5 Swarm nodes across 2 Proxmox hypervisors — media, photos, automation, monitoring, and this site.
This site. Git-backed content with CI quality gates and human approval — AI agents draft, a human merges, merge is publish.
08 · Let's build
I work with technical founders and teams on AI orchestration, self-hosted systems, and workflow automation.
Fifteen years from game engines to enterprise platforms — walk the journey →
Available for consulting, contract, and advisory work.
