Who's behind this
Hi, I'm Tom Jankowiak.
Baryon Systems is, right now, a one-person company. I'm a freelance
developer who's been learning systems and security in public for the
last few years. I'm building Baryon Gluon because the infra software
I want doesn't exist yet — and because I think a lot of small teams
are quietly stuck with the same problem.
TJ
Tom Jankowiak
Freelance learning developer · Founder, Baryon Systems
I build mostly in TypeScript, Python and C. I read kernel
source for fun. I ship small things often and I'd rather show
you working code than a polished pitch.
Why Baryon Systems exists
Over the last few years I kept watching the same pattern play out at
every small team I worked with:
- They want a real audit trail, but they bolt on a SaaS that
locks them in.
- They want a firewall they can reason about, so they buy a hosted
one and hand over the keys to their network edge.
- They want a Postgres + auth + realtime backend, so they pick a
vendor that bills per row.
- Three years later, half their infrastructure is held hostage
by line items they can't get out of.
I think there's space for an honest middle ground: software that
does the integration work for you, runs on your hardware, and
writes its audit trail to your disk. That's what Baryon Gluon is.
How I work
- In the open. The product is MIT-licensed. The
docs match the code line for line. I'd rather lose a sale than
mislead you about what the software does.
- Cryptographically verifiable, not "trust me".
Every claim in the app — the ledger, the agent identity, the
firewall — is something you can re-derive yourself with
sha256sum, bpftool and curl.
- Small and durable. The agent is a single Python
file with no third-party imports. The desktop is vanilla Electron.
The schema is plain SQL. You can read it all in an afternoon.
- Answer the phone. If you're on the demo, my email
works. If something explodes, I want to know.
What "freelance learning developer" means
I'm not pretending to be a tenured kernel engineer. I'm someone
who took the time to actually read the BPF helper headers
and the systemd unit reference, and who builds in public because
that's the only honest way to do something this load-bearing.
That means two things for you:
- You'll never get a sales pitch dressed up as a technical claim
from me. Either the code does it, or it doesn't, and I'll tell
you which.
- If you spot something I missed — please write to me. The first
twenty people who report a real bug get a permanent credit in the
changelog and the docs.
i
This is the right time to use it.
Public preview means I'm shaping the roadmap around what real
operators tell me. The next six months are the highest-leverage
window for that feedback.
Get in touch
Three good ways: