Published May 1, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek, Joe has been writing about technology since starting his career in 2018 at KnowTechie. He's covered everything from Apple to apps and crowdfunding and loves getting to the bottom of complicated topics. In that time, he's also written for SlashGear and numerous corporate clients before finding his home at XDA in the spring of 2023. He was the kid who took apart every toy to see how it worked, even if it didn't exactly go back together afterward. That's given him a solid background for explaining how complex systems work together, and he promises he's gotten better at the putting things back together stage since then. I've been using OPNsense for my firewall and router for a while, after hearing so many things about it from my colleagues . Being able to install it on a wide variety of hardware was a novel experience, and the depth of plugins and scripts helped me learn a lot about networking.…