VPN Shelf

Marcus Hadley

Writes for VPN Shelf

About

Senior software engineer, 38, Seattle. The home office in Beacon Hill has turned into something closer to a small lab: three monitors at different brightness levels, a router and managed switch sitting on a hutch shelf with the LEDs always blinking, two mini-PCs running 24/7 for continuous speed logging. The whiteboard beside the desk is covered in latency tables and crossed-out VPN config notes. Lila, who shares the house and keeps a running count of things the network has broken without warning, puts the total device count at "too many."

Testing methodology here is closer to engineering practice than to consumer journalism. Speed tests run against the same server endpoints at the same times daily, over a window long enough to catch variance rather than just peak numbers. Ezra Pontis, a backend engineer I used to work with who now runs his own benchmarks from SoMa and shares the raw CSVs unprompted, is a useful check on whether Seattle-specific routing is skewing results. Callum Prentice, who I met at a Seattle privacy meetup where he was presenting on DNS-over-HTTPS and immediately started fact-checking my assumptions mid-Q&A, comes at methodology from the other direction: blanket distrust of closed-source networking software that keeps the published numbers honest.

What a software engineering background mostly changes is what I pay attention to. Session variance matters more than a single headline number: a provider that looks fast in one test but drifts over a sustained window is a different product from one with consistent readings. Kill switch behavior across reboots, DNS exposure under different protocols, and split-tunnel edge cases all get tested specifically because they come up in real use.

No networking certifications, no formal security training. The comparisons here come from two years of paid subscriptions and a lot of test runs, not from a credential.

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