Eric Reich

About

I’m a creative technologist — someone who builds things with both code and craft. My interests span hardware hacking, self-hosted infrastructure, media production, and the open web.

This site exists because I believe in owning my own platform. No algorithms, no engagement metrics, no corporate feed. Just a personal space on the internet that I control end-to-end.

I live in Minneapolis and spend my time across a few practices that all turn out to be the same practice: paying attention to systems, then nudging them.

On bikes, that means year-round riding on a steel steed — group rides, alley cats, gravel events when the season turns. Behind decks, it’s typically an Allen & Heath Xone:96 and a pair of CDJs, mostly pointed at minimal house and techno. With projectors, it’s VDMX6, ISF shaders, and HAP-encoded 16mm archival footage. In a terminal, it’s a home lab and a slow accumulation of self-hosted tools that I’d rather run myself than rent.

The throughline is curiosity about how feedback works — in a body on a bike, in a room full of speakers, in a piece of software, in a group of people trying to decide something together.

Why This Site

I’m not a developer. I’m a business analyst — I spend my days mapping workflows, writing test scripts, sitting in rooms where eight stakeholders need to agree on what a button does. So when I set out to make a personal site, I wasn’t trying to make a statement about web design. I wanted the thing to work, and I wanted to be able to maintain it myself a year from now without re-learning a framework.

Minimalism, for me, is mostly a utility argument. Clean layout, self-hosted fonts, real links. If I want to add a page, I write a markdown file, Hugo builds it, and it goes on the server. That’s the whole workflow.

It also matches how I think about my home infrastructure. I run my own stuff — calendar, tasks, media, a Loomio instance for a group I help organize — because I want to know where things live and how to get them back if something breaks. Own the data, prefer local over cloud, choose tools you can still run when the company behind them pivots or folds. A personal site should follow the same logic. One folder. Plain files. If the host disappears tomorrow, I move the folder somewhere else and I’m done.

The honest truth is that I’m a people person. The site exists so people can find me, read what I’m working on, and reach me. Everything past that is decoration I’d have to maintain. Cutting the decoration isn’t a style choice — it’s the same instinct that makes a good requirements doc short. Say the thing. Let the reader move on.

But I think I have good ideas to share and a creative mind behind the technical abstractions. I’m inquisitive to a fault and constantly on the hunt to learn more, do better work, and be more useful to the people around me.

What I Do

Infrastructure & Homelab Self-hosted services on a Synology NAS — media servers, automation, monitoring, and experimenting with what’s possible on consumer hardware.

Software & Hardware From Raspberry Pi projects to home automation to self-hosting useless toys for a week and a half and forgetting about it, a jack of all trades and master of none.

Media & Creative Photography, Djing, Vjing. I document what I make and what inspires me.

Interests Information theory. Predictive processing. Deliberative democracy as a practical organizing problem rather than a political theory exercise. Civic tech tools — Pol.is, Decidim, Loomio. The history of minimal techno labels. Chain wax chemistry. Whatever rabbit hole the last conversation opened up.

Get in Touch

See the Contact page for ways to reach me.