A Note on My Writing Process
Full transparency upfront: I'm extremely concise by nature—often too concise. I struggle to expand my thoughts into full, readable posts. Every article on this blog starts as my raw ideas, technical notes, or bullet points, which I then expand using AI assistance to transform my compressed thoughts into coherent, detailed writing. The ideas, experiences, and technical knowledge are entirely mine; the AI just helps me articulate them in a way that's actually useful when I revisit these posts later. Think of it as having a writing partner who helps me communicate more clearly with my future self.
Welcome to My Digital Garden
This blog exists primarily for one person: me, five years from now, frantically searching through browser history trying to remember how I fixed that networking issue between Docker containers, or what convinced me to finally take the plunge into learning Kubernetes.
My journey into technology started in 2014 with a simple goal: hosting a Minecraft server. That single project opened the floodgates. I learned C# and PHP, picked up SQL, and eventually found myself working as a software developer for nearly two years at a defense contractor, writing applications in C# and TypeScript with Angular. But somewhere along the way, my interests shifted from pure software development back to the infrastructure and systems administration side of things—the world I first touched when I was just trying to keep that Minecraft server running.
These days, I'm working as a data center technician while actively building toward becoming a cloud engineer or architect. My home lab has grown significantly: I've built my own NAS, set up a peer-to-peer VPN infrastructure, and I'm running a growing collection of self-hosted services in containers with carefully orchestrated networking across multiple VPS instances. My current learning roadmap includes Ansible for proper infrastructure-as-code documentation (because I'm tired of forgetting my own configurations), and Kubernetes is sitting on my to-do list, waiting for me to finally dive in properly.
I'm particularly drawn to federated systems and privacy-focused technologies—Matrix, Mastodon, and the broader FOSS ecosystem that refuses to accept that five corporations should control the entire internet. My friend and I spend hours theorizing about alternative architectures and open-source solutions to replace the proprietary tools everyone just accepts as inevitable.
What You'll Find Here
This blog is intentionally unstructured. Some posts will be technical documentation: step-by-step guides on problems I've solved, configurations that actually worked, and lessons learned from spectacular failures. For example, I'll be posting soon about how I set up my NAS to be securely accessible from the internet using my VPN setup—something that took more troubleshooting than I'd like to admit. Other posts will track my learning journey—notes on new technologies I'm exploring, progress reports on ongoing projects, and the inevitable frustrations that come with teaching yourself complex systems.
Occasionally, I might touch on political or social issues, particularly when they intersect with technology, privacy, or digital rights. I'm not trying to plant a flag on any ideological battlefield; these posts are just me working through ideas that matter to me.
The tone will shift depending on what I'm writing about. Technical guides will be direct and practical. Personal reflections might meander a bit. I'm writing for myself, but if you've stumbled across this and find something useful, that's a bonus.
This is my notebook, my portfolio, my motivation to keep building and learning. If nothing else, it's proof that I'm still showing up and doing the work.
Let's see where this goes.