This site is under construction - not everything may work correctly yet.

user@boten-dev ~ $ whoami

BotenAqua

Analytics engineer by day. I build data pipelines, self-host my digital life, and write about what I learn along the way.
Privacy-first by conviction, not by checklist.


user@boten-dev ~/projects $ cat botenbot/README.md | head
featured

BotenBot

A Discord bot you can self-host from source or deploy with Docker - or just invite the already-hosted instance, fully active and ready to go.

View docs →

user@boten-dev ~ $ ls -la ./interests/

Data & Analytics Engineering

Building and optimizing data pipelines with dbt and SQL. CI/CD from scratch. A model that ran in 3000s now finishes in 100.

dbt SQL Redshift CI/CD

Privacy & Self-hosting

De-Googlifying my digital life one service at a time. Homelab with Pi-hole, Jellyfin, Portainer, and a Mikrotik-managed network.

homelab Docker Mikrotik Pi-hole

AI-augmented workflows

Using AI as a daily tool, not a buzzword. Cursor for dbt infrastructure, Gemini API for batch processing, pragmatic automation.

Cursor LLM Gemini API

Learning in public

Every project and learning session becomes a blog post. Open-source, free resources, knowledge shared as it's gained.

blog open-source docs

user@boten-dev ~/posts $ ls -lt | head -3

Latest from the blog

2026-04-12 5 min read

Privacy-first analytics: how hard can it be?

Adding privacy-respecting analytics to a static site sounded simple. Two hours of reading about personal data later, I realized this is going to be a series.

learning privacy de-Googleing self-host
2026-04-07 2 min read

Walls of code

When your daily output is SQL and YAML, showing your work to non-technical people is basically impossible. Time to change that.

learning
2026-04-01 5 min read

Done beats perfect

The first version doesn't need to be good - it just needs to exist. Once it does, you have something real to improve instead of a plan collecting dust.

learning

View all posts →