viento.au is a playground of a mad tinkerer

The site is usually under heavy development and is only partly-made for outside audiences — welcome! Please excuse the changing nature of content and services.

about silas palmer

Silas Palmer is an Australian public sector strategist, technologist, and incurable tinkerer who never met a problem he didn’t want to pull apart and rebuild better. 

For more than fourteen years, he worked across government designing policy, shaping major initiatives, and helping teams communicate clearly in environments where complexity is the default setting. His career has taken him from transport planning for Olympic-scale events to reimagining corporate functions for mega-scale public works authorities, and even to advising on how difficult economic transitions can go astray if they lose sight of the people at the ‘coal face’. His approach blends clarity, pragmatism, and an unwavering belief that government does its best when ordinary people participate.

Beyond government, Silas runs a steadily expanding home lab that he treats like both a playground and a proving ground. He builds tools, tutorials, and bite-sized software projects to make technology less intimidating—especially for beginners just dipping their toes into self-hosting or containerisation. He’s happiest when he’s explaining the bits most people find messy, or elbow-deep in a new experiment, lately involving the Proxmox Virtualisation Environment and a growing constellation of devices connected by Tailscale.

Whether he’s refining policy, configuring a misbehaving server, or shepherding logs through Tailscale at midnight, Silas is guided by curiosity, thoughtful design, and the conviction that good systems—technical or human—make life simpler, kinder, and a little more fun.