Hey, I’m Zen 👋

I’m a 17-year-old working in public across security, infrastructure, systems, and open-source software.

Right now, my work is centred on three things:

• serving as a maintainer for Caddy, as part of Caddyserver, and contributing to a serious open-source infrastructure project used around the world
• publishing technical writing on security, standards, implementation behaviour and real engineering trade-offs at https://steadytao.com/writing
• building Surveyor, a post-quantum readiness and cryptographic inventory tool

What I’m Building

My main project is Surveyor.

Surveyor is a post-quantum readiness and cryptographic inventory tool designed to help organisations understand where quantum-vulnerable public-key cryptography is actually in use across infrastructure, software, and services.

The goal is simple: make post-quantum migration start from real visibility and prioritisation, not guesswork.

More broadly, I care about building software and writing that are:

• technically defensible
• useful under real conditions
• worth maintaining properly

Why This Work Matters To Me

I am especially interested in the parts of engineering where correctness, trust boundaries, standards and operational reality matter more than slogans.

That is the common thread behind my work in open source, security research, technical writing, and tooling. I want to build things that hold up under scrutiny and are genuinely useful to both other people and myself.

Why Sponsorship Helps

Sponsorship helps me spend more time on this work.

It supports continued open-source contribution, deeper technical writing, and the sustained effort required to build serious tools properly. It also gives me more room to keep doing careful technical work in public and push further into projects that I hope will have lasting value.

If you choose to sponsor me, thank you. It genuinely helps more than you could imagine.