Why me?

I operate in permanent tension.

On one hand: the conviction that exceptional systems can be built from first principles – by one person, on hardware you can touch. On the other: the suspicion that mediocrity wins the moment you stop paying attention. That tension is the engine.

Restless idealismImpending doom
– the tension between these poles is what keeps me going.

“It is the tension between these poles – a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other – that kept me going.”

– Hunter S. Thompson

“Forget load-screens, we are past that. Everything has to be fluid. Try, see what sticks, and then scale up natively.”

– me, announcing this ecosystem

I’m Niels Toren (nierto). I started as a hobbyist, got hooked on C, and never recovered. Geodineum is what I have been building since: modular infrastructure that runs serious software on modest, owned hardware – no cloud dependency, no closed ecosystems. This site runs on it.

  1. 2018first C program
  2. 2023Geodineum begins
  3. 2026·03gMath on crates.io
  4. 2026·07ecosystem live – 10 sites, own hardware


I build to solve problems I had myself – for me and my family – to grow and prosper, and to leave something useful for humanity. If you care about owning your stack and building systems that last, we’ll likely work well together.