I learn systems by running them.

01Homelab

This starts at home and not at work: hardware in a cupboard and a hypervisor on it, machines to take apart on purpose. It is what made the service desk possible — the job came after the lab rather than the other way around, and the lab is still running.

02Helpdesk

Then the service desk, and not a degree: other people's machines, other people's deadlines, and a queue that does not care which layer the fault is in. It is where the habit of reading the error before guessing at it comes from.

03First website

The first thing built rather than repaired: a storefront on Shopify Hydrogen, put together with an AI assistant at hand. It taught the shape of a modern front end, and that a page which works on a laptop has not yet met a certificate, a cold cache or a slow connection.

04Own VPS

One VPS instead of a hosted platform: the proxy, the certificates, the logs and the restarts are mine. The site you are reading is that machine describing itself — every figure on it comes from the system that produces it, and the outages are written down rather than waited out.

05Talos lab

Kubernetes without a shell underneath it: an immutable, API-driven operating system, an address pool of its own, and a repository the cluster reads instead of a console I click. The lab is where that stack was learned while nothing depended on it yet.

NOWBare-metal cluster

The same stack on hardware I own, and the system the role on this page rests on: declared in Git, reconciled by Flux, with the database and the backups run as operators. It is in build and not live, because nothing public is measured on it yet — and on this site a state is a measurement rather than a feeling.