Mads Nygaard

Cand.it. - Freelance UX & Network Engineer

About

By 2026 I exceeded 20 years of professional experience with web-based technology and design.I graduated with a BA in English from the University of Southern Denmark in 2002 and stayed on for an MSc in Multimedia Design, Technology and Production. While studying I worked as webmaster at SDU's International Office. During this period I co-designed one of the early web-based content management systems with true front-end editing, built in PHP on a LAMP stack using PEAR components. We called it LetCMS and announced it in late 2004. In hindsight we probably should have open-sourced the code, as front-end editing went on to become the standard for user-friendly CMS design and largely still is.From there I spent a year as F2F campaign manager at Amnesty International, responsible for the Region of Southern Denmark, before returning to web work as webmaster at Juliana Greenhouses. The 2010s went by with a combination of IT educational roles and freelance work in open-source CMS development, design and SEO. My interest in UX design was reignited along the way, and to this day I have a deep love for iconography in visual communication.After a stint as an ERP consultant at Accure and Merit doing output management, I found my footing on the Linux side and was offered the opportunity to go deeper into network engineering. It felt like a natural step: freelancing had already taught me the ins and outs of DNS and hosting, and I had been teaching myself Linux for years, so the terminal was familiar ground when I moved into sysadmin practice. Most of my work since has been on Debian and Ubuntu VPS setups on DigitalOcean and UpCloud — LAMP and LEMP stacks, Docker, and hardening with firewall rules and WAF configuration, more recently shifting toward cloud WAF and CDN layers with Cloudflare and Google.Today I work as a fullstack freelancer and consultant on cloud server management, network design and application security. I have gradually moved toward orchestrating and designing maintenance flows built on specialised subagents in Claude Code, each owning its own silo of server operations. I also do UX and app development on the side.

Contact

Feel free to get in touch.