I almost quit Deflecto. More than once.
Deflecto is the thing that keeps infrastructure online when someone is trying very hard to put it on the floor. A Layer 7 anti-DDoS service and reverse proxy, written in Rust, made in Romania. It stands in front of xTQ Web and everything else I run, so an attacker has to get through it before they ever reach a site. Today it does that quietly, every day. It did not start quietly.
I opened the first notes on Deflecto on 5 October 2025. "A next-generation Layer 7 anti-DDoS protection service, proudly developed in Romania." Big words for a folder with almost nothing in it. It took until 9 August 2026 to put it into beta, and on 7 September I reopened the site and the tickets on Discord.
That is when it got ugly.
The attacks came in waves. People did not just test Deflecto, they tried to put it down, over and over, like it was a personal thing. And when the floods did not finish it, the talking started. Deflecto is bad. It does not really work. Pick a rumor, someone was spreading it. You build something for months, you put your name on it, and people line up to tell everyone it is worthless while they hammer it at the same time.
There was a night I was done. Not tired, done. Ready to close the folder and pretend I never started.
Then I got on a call with Nuti. A very good friend, and someone who actually knows this world, because he built his own WAF, Reversus. He told me he had given up on it. And then he said the thing that, looking back, saved Deflecto:
"It's impossible."
Something in me just went, oh yeah? Okay. Give me a few days.
I do not fully know why that flipped the switch. Maybe because it came from someone I respect, someone who had been exactly where I was and walked away. I did not want "impossible" to be the last word on it.
A few days later the first real version was ready. It held 300,000 requests a second. The floods that were supposed to end Deflecto hit it and broke.
After that it was a streak. Update after update, every single day, taking it apart and putting it back together better, closing every hole the attacks found. I have not really stopped since. What Deflecto is today, the thing standing quietly in front of all my infrastructure, is the sum of that, one stubborn day stacked on the last.
So if you are building something and the floods are coming and people are telling you it cannot be done, I am not going to hand you a motivational line. I will just tell you what happened to me. The person who said "it's impossible" was right about his own project and wrong about mine, and the only difference was that I gave it a few more days.
Give it a few more days.
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