Home internet in the 90s felt simple. You plugged into Ethernet, got an IPv4 address, and you could expose a service directly. Today the path is layered and driven by economics. IPv4 did not end in a hard way. It became scarce and costly, see IPv4 address exhaustion. Data centers and enterprises still buy and route IPv4. Most residential users are placed behind Carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT) and many providers mix in IPv6 to keep compatibility while lowering costs.

This post maps that landscape with a practical lens. We will move from end to end addressing to provider networks that multiplex thousands of customers behind a few public IPs using NAT. CGNAT saves addresses and reduces ISP costs, but it blocks inbound connectivity, see NAT traversal. It also complicates games, VoIP, and P2P, and makes self-hosting fragile without extra tools....

This blog is meant to be a place for discussion. Most posts will circle around technology, software engineering, DevOps, networking, tunneling, programming languages, and AI/LLMs, but the scope is wider. At times, the content will also touch on gaming, music, or personal reflections that shaped my path.

I began programming in 2008, still a child at the time, driven by curiosity and the desire to build things for myself. Much of what later became my professional career started as experiments: setting up private servers for World of Warcraft, Minecraft, and other games, exploring open source tools, and eventually building my own homelab infrastructure. These projects weren’t just hobbies; they were training grounds that taught me about systems, persistence, and problem-solving. I did a lot of bad engineering stuff that way too, but they were my toy box most of the time....