Become a sponsor to Alexander Birkner

Hi, I'm Alex 👋

I'm a software engineer from Spenge, near Bielefeld, Germany 🇩🇪, with 10+ years in the hosting industry, most of it in game server hosting. By day I'm a Technical Lead & System Architect at GPORTAL, building platforms that orchestrate thousands of servers on bare metal and Kubernetes. On the side I work as a freelancer at birkner.io.

🛠️ What I'm working on

In my free time I build and maintain open-source tools, mostly born from problems I ran into myself:

• 📦 silo: a self-hosted package registry for RPM, Alpine APK, npm, pacman, and apt, all from a single server (Rust)
• 🎮 go-steam: a Go library for downloading Steam content and Workshop items without the Steam client
• ☸️ openshift-homelab: guides and automation for running OpenShift 4 on bare metal at home
• 🏠 Home Assistant integrations for 1KOMMA5° Heartbeat and Steinbach heat pumps

My focus is always the same: pragmatic, well-documented tools that work reliably in real-world operation.

💖 Why your sponsorship matters

All of these projects are built and maintained in my spare time, next to a full-time job. Your support helps me:

• ⏱️ Spend more time on bug fixes, new features, and answering issues
• 🖥️ Cover hardware and hosting costs for my homelab, test environments, and CI
• 📚 Write better documentation so the tools are easier to adopt
• 🚀 Start new projects around Go, Kubernetes, and infrastructure

Every sponsorship, no matter how small, is a real motivation boost and shows me that this work is useful to others. Thank you! 🙏

💼 Need help with a project? I'm also available for freelance work in software development, DevOps, and IT security: birkner.io · 📧 hello@birkner.io