~/portfolio

About

I'm Rafael Simões, a threat intelligence engineer. I build things in a homelab so I can learn to do them properly.

Why this site exists

Most portfolios list what someone built. That tells a reader very little. What I find worth writing down is why a decision was made and what I rejected, because in security the reasoning is most of the work. So every project here leads with the decisions: the options I weighed, the one I chose, and the tradeoff I accepted for it.

If a writeup here only told you which tool I picked, it would have failed at the thing it was written for.

How I work

I run a homelab: a server, network gear, and the services I put on top of them. I hold what I deploy there to production standards even when that is plainly overkill for an environment with one user. That is deliberate. I would rather learn to do something properly on hardware I own than meet it for the first time somewhere the stakes are real.

Most of the design work here was subtraction rather than addition. It is easy to specify a system with a vector store, an agent framework, and a queue behind it. Working out which of those a single person genuinely needs, and then not building the rest, took longer and mattered more.

How this site is built

These pages are generated rather than hand-written. Notes, code, and design conversations go into a private wiki as cited pages. A publish step then promotes the ones I choose into this repository, strips the private source links, and inlines the evidence behind each claim so you can follow the reasoning without seeing my raw notes.

That pipeline is itself the first project written up here, including the parts of it I would build differently: a private knowledge wiki that compiles into a public portfolio .

On AI assistance

Drafts here are AI-assisted. The decisions, the review, and the technical claims are mine. Every page passes a schema validator, a controlled vocabulary check, and a secret scan before it reaches this site, and I read each one before it goes live. I would rather state that plainly than have you wonder.

Contact