[email protected]: ~/home
[email protected]:~$

Greg Vogt

Software and Systems Engineer

Building the systems you don't see.

available for contract backend / infra / automation loc: remote

About

~$ cat about.md

I came to software the way most people who are serious about it do: sideways. It started at four, taking computers apart to see what was inside. Not always successfully. The curiosity stuck even when the reassembly didn't.

Fast food management, retail management, and somewhere in between, that same instinct applied to every system I encountered: how does this actually work, and what happens when it doesn't?

That curiosity led to stints across a few industries: social media, game studios, video distribution. Each one was a different angle on the same question. What I build now reflects that. Backend systems, automation pipelines, tooling that handles the unglamorous work reliably so the rest of the application can do its job.

I'm not interested in impressive looking software. I need to know what makes it work.

From the beginning: make it, break it, fix it. The only thing that's changed? My success rate at the latter.

Selected work

~$ ls -la ~/work/
The Programmer's Grimoire, the complete series
drwxr-xr-x   ★ featured

The Programmer's Grimoire

Long-form guides that take a reader from zero to operating a system in production, and double as a field reference you can open to a single self-contained page during a 2am incident. Every claim is cited to primary sources, and where sources conflict the guide surfaces the conflict instead of smoothing it over. 5 volumes so far, covering AppArmor, Assembly, Linux, PHP, and SELinux.

  • Technical Writing
  • Security
  • Linux
  • Field Reference
read the series → 5 volumes · Read online · PDF · EPUB · AZW3
-rwxr-xr-x

PHP_Sessions

A drop-in replacement for PHP's native session handling that takes over transparently. Encryption at rest with AES-256-GCM or XSalsa20-Poly1305, per-session keys derived server-side via HKDF-SHA256 and never sent to the client. Dual storage with automatic failover between MariaDB and the filesystem, CSRF double-submit protection built into the session layer, session fixation prevention, and UUIDv7 primary keys. Zero production dependencies, a single file, PHP 8.3 and above.

  • PHP
  • OpenSSL
  • Sodium
  • Cryptography
source →
-rwxr-xr-x

Redux

A lightweight PHP framework built around a single principle: give developers the structural pieces they actually need, then get out of the way. Routing, dependency handling, a templating layer, the basics. Nothing that assumes what your application is trying to do before you have figured that out yourself.

  • PHP
  • Framework
  • Routing
  • MVC
source coming soon
-rwxr-xr-x

PDF-to-PNG

Built for a friend in disaster relief whose field teams needed PDF situation reports in front of people fast, on platforms that mangle PDFs. Batch converts each page to a high-density PNG tuned for social display, sharp on a phone or a desktop. Built to be run by the people who need it, not by developers.

  • Python
  • ImageMagick
  • Automation
~$ ls ~/work/scripts/

Contact

~$ ./contact --hire

Open to contract and consulting work on backend systems, automation, and infrastructure tooling. The unglamorous work, done reliably.

[email protected] → linkedin github