Cbox
Cbox builds software and infrastructure for systems that have to work in production. Founded and run by Sylvester Damgaard.
Cbox grew out of Combo-Box, an online PDA I built with my friend Joaquim before I turned 18. Since then, my work has spanned hosting, telephony, drone inspection, broadcast CMS, and cloud infrastructure. Today I focus on making production systems reliable, observable, and secure.
What Cbox does
Cbox Cortex is the main product. It deploys and orchestrates Docker containers on your own servers, with service orchestration for MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, and more. Any language, with deep PHP support. Currently in private beta.
The open source packages solve specific production problems: queue autoscaling, telemetry, system metrics, PHP-FPM monitoring, and health checks. PHP, Laravel, and Statamic remain important specializations.
On the consulting side, I take on a limited number of projects, from architecture and software development to infrastructure, reliability, and security. You work directly with me.
The person behind it
I'm Sylvester Damgaard, founder of Cbox and Principal Software Engineer at Geocodio. I've spent years as a CTO, founder, architect, and Principal Engineer. My work starts with the business or product problem and carries through architecture, infrastructure, and production.
I co-founded EasyInspect and served as CTO. We built Inspection Cloud, a SaaS platform for drone-based infrastructure inspection used by SBB (Swiss Federal Railways), Vejdirektoratet, Sund og Bælt, Cowi, and Rambøll. Computer vision for damage detection in wind turbine blades, concrete structures, and bridges. I showcased the platform at UAV shows in London and Las Vegas.
At TV2 Regionerne I was Principal Architect. I built two CMS platforms (Bazo, then Statamic), contributed 200+ pull requests to Statamic core, created 40+ addons, migrated close to a million videos, and ran the Kubernetes infrastructure solo for all eight regional news sites. 90,000 requests per second on election night. I presented this story at Laravel Live DK 2024.
Before that: chief developer at Debitel where I ran GoIP, one of Denmark's largest IP telephony providers (100,000+ private customers). Co-founded MyDroneAcademy, Denmark's first approved drone school. Hosted Unity 3D's first public release when they were still at IT University Copenhagen. Built Frac.dk and Hotserv.dk, hosting platforms that grew to 100,000+ active users. And more: Cabinn Hotels (IT infrastructure), Ringsted Festival (WiFi and surveillance), Heste-Nettet (Denmark's largest horse community, e-commerce award winner 2005).
How Cbox works
I take on projects that fit alongside my full-time role, so availability is limited. As more implementation is delegated to agents, I focus on architecture, constraints, and verification. I'm exploring what safe agent access to tools, infrastructure, and data requires: clear identity and permissions, observable actions, and a way to recover when things go wrong.
Outside of work, I brew craft beer. Patience, process, honest assessment of the result. Applies to both.
// Sylvester