Tech Projects
Networking, automation, AI, and hands-on engineering — 17+ years of building things that work
Homelab & NetDevOps
Running a home lab since 2002 — today it’s a full enterprise analog: OPNsense firewall, Cisco switching, NetBox as the network source of truth, Ansible orchestrated through Semaphore, and a Grafana + Telegraf + InfluxDB monitoring stack, all running on Docker and self-hosted GitLab with GitHub mirroring. The newest layer is local AI: LM Studio serving models on consumer GPU hardware, with agentic coding tools that write and test Ansible playbooks, push them through GitLab CI, and deploy to real network gear. It’s a production-style NetDevOps pipeline that fits in a home office.
Read: One Shared Brain for All My AI Assistants →
Automation, Scripting & Tools
Python and Ansible are the daily drivers. Highlights include Ansible roles for Cisco config pushes with vault-secured credentials and Jinja2 templating, a Flask-based IPAM tool that uses Python as the brain and Ansible as the hands, web scrapers that turn junkyard inventory into structured data, and a full stock-screening and backtesting platform with broker integration for paper trading. If a tool doesn’t exist, I build it.
Networking, CAD & Other Tech
Random work that may be interesting enough to post here — I’m always working on something. Network gear, 3D-printed brackets and shop tools designed in CAD, and whatever else the current project needs.
Off-Grid Solar
Designed and installed a 48V LiFePO4 off-grid solar system to code — 30psf and 160mph wind rating, fused, surge-protected, and grounded, with battery capacity comparable to a Tesla Powerwall at a fraction of the cost. Engineering isn’t just racks and code.
Write-ups
The build logs behind the projects above, newest first.
- A Local AI Search Engine for My NotesMarkdown notes synced phone to PC with Syncthing, summarized and semantically searchable by a local LLM. No subscriptions, nothing in the cloud.
- Migrating ESXi to Proxmox Without Losing Your ZFS PoolsI swapped a 2020-era ESXi box over to Proxmox and moved TrueNAS CORE to SCALE in one afternoon, with a USB stick as the whole rollback plan.
- No Plaintext Anywhere: A Secrets Pass Over the Whole LabBefore mirroring my repos to GitHub, I audited every place a credential could hide. Found a few. This is what the pass looked like.
- Building an Off-Road Sim From the Physics UpCustom raycast suspension in Unity, no WheelCollider. The one-system architecture lesson, and the launch-into-orbit bug that came down to initial conditions.
- Swapping a 3.0 Into My E46 the Right WayRod knock killed the 2.5. What went into sourcing a clean M54B30, why the rod bearings stayed untouched, and the while-it’s-out list that makes a swap last.
- Building a Stock Screener I Can Actually TrustThe rebuild rule: the tool is not allowed to flatter me. Verified fills, buy-and-hold benchmarks, and a loss autopsy for every losing trade.