Workshop

By: Ian McCutcheon

Latest Posts

The Workshop @ esoup.net

This is my digital workshop — where I build tools, write about networks, and work through ideas in the open. Thirty years in networking and systems, and I'm still finding things worth building and worth questioning.

What's on the Workbench

Tools & Products. I build things that solve real problems and ship them. DNSlurp is a DNS lookup API. SSLurp checks certificates. MailTaste decodes email authentication. These aren't demos — they're running in production.

Network Architecture. An eight-part series on building an enterprise anycast CDN at the network edge. Theory grounded in operational experience — BGP, anycast, trust boundaries, and what happens when things fail.

Protocols & Payments. HTTP 402 has been "reserved for future use" for almost thirty years. I built a working implementation. The Pay-Through pattern turns API rate limits into protocol-native payment negotiation. You can test it yourself.

DNS & Certificates. DNSSEC walkthroughs, CAA records, wildcard certificates, and the things people get wrong about all of them.

The Perspective

I question defaults. Default routes, default configurations, default assumptions about how systems should work. If something has been done a certain way for twenty years, that's not a reason to keep doing it — it's a reason to look harder.

Everything here comes from operating real systems at scale. The writing is opinionated because the experience behind it is specific.