About

Hi, I’m Blagovest Petrov, and this is my personal blog. I write mostly about open source, DevOps and other random ideas. More than anything, it’s a diary: a place where I document what I’ve built and learned, so I can find it again later.

By day I’m a DevOps tech lead at IBM, working on the Concert Workflows project. I’m also the founder of VuteTech, a small IT consulting company.

Away from the keyboard, I’m happily married and in the middle of building a house.

When there’s time left, I go kayaking on dams or along the Greek seaside, visit music festivals and work on DIY projects.

Bor

Most of my free time goes into Bor, an open-source policy management platform for Linux desktops. It lets you define, distribute and enforce desktop configuration (browser policies, KDE and GNOME settings, polkit rules, packages) across a whole fleet of machines, in real time. Think Group Policy, but for Linux.

I’ve been building it at night, on weekends and on holidays since the beginning of 2025, but the idea has been growing in my head for more than 15 years. Looking after Linux computer labs has followed me since the very start of my IT career. It began at my high school, where I was already maintaining the Linux desktops while still a student there. Later came ESFAM, formerly IFAG, and the Francophone Centre at Sofia University, whose Ubuntu workstations became the subject of my very first blog post. In recent years I’ve been helping the ZaSelata foundation build Linux computer labs in village community centres, the Bulgarian читалища (more about that).

Every one of those places needed the same thing: a way to keep many Linux desktops configured and under control without walking from machine to machine. Bor is the tool I wished I had in all of them.