Enterprise CI/CD engineer by trade. FOSS developer by conviction. Homelab operator since before it was profitable. (Still isn't.)
A decade-plus in enterprise infrastructure for a F500 operation: container platforms, GitOps pipelines, service mesh, database replication, and Incident Command duty for the ugly nights. The title says analyst. The pager says otherwise.
Grade school was a tiny rural day school, the kind where enrollment occasionally hit single digits, and one kid could end up deputized as the unofficial IT department because the computers worked better when touched with confidence. In third grade the gym collapsed under snow an hour before dismissal, which did wonders for everyone's relationship with winter. The point is: small buildings, big curiosity, and always a network closet that needed minding.
Religion wasn't a choice, it was the operating environment, preinstalled at birth. Somewhere in there came a stint at a religious academy that will remain thoroughly unnamed. No dorm internet existed, but students could buy dial-up accounts in their own names, so mine was. What did a young mind raised on this new internet do with private connectivity? Played an online fantasy game (Ultima Online) and wrote an English-lit short story about daemons, because that is literally the villain of the game and it seemed timely.
The administration interpreted the fiction as a spiritual crisis rather than fan-fiction. The ultimatum: quit the game or be expelled. Consultation with parents produced a counter-offer the next morning: no.
We paid for that internet. You cannot fire me, because I quit. The car was packed by afternoon.
The exit had a smell to it, and by 19 the whole belief system was already retired, uninstalled, disk wiped. What stayed installed: the science, the tinkering, the modems. Through a first career in veterinary medicine, licensed and elbows-deep in science, there was always a network cabinet lurking nearby: the vet hospital where "the computer girl" and "the technician" were the same badge.
Somewhere along the way a company education program appeared, fully paid, so free beat pretty, and a help desk door opened in another state. Homelab running the whole time, because it always had been. Eight years and four roles later, the kid with the modem is architecting the enterprise stack.
"That can't be done" is a hypothesis, not an answer. Neither is "quit playing the game."
FOSS Android kiosk browser for displaying single URLs in fullscreen immersive mode. MIT licensed, pure AOSP, zero proprietary dependencies, robust URL validation, 31 unit tests. Listed on F-Droid.
Automated Android emulator test rig developed for kiFOSSk, running nine virtual devices across four API levels (24 through 35) in parallel on a single workstation. Sequential execution of the suite took about 25 minutes; the parallel implementation brought it to about 10. Getting there meant solving real distributed-testing problems: per-device serial isolation, collision-free ADB port assignment, unattended permission dialog dismissal, stale emulator lock recovery, and thread-safe result collection. The device pool is also load-balanced deliberately, interleaving heavier emulator profiles with lighter ones so CPU-bound work stays evenly distributed, with GPU acceleration absorbing rendering spikes. Built to be finished, not abandoned: the project got hard midway, and the correct response to difficulty was deemed to be "keep building." The farm repaid the stubbornness immediately, catching a real back-navigation bug on all nine devices that had survived every manual test pass.
Self-developed flight tracker that listens to live ADS-B data from a personal receiver feed, computes real-time distance and bearing to nearby aircraft, and renders it on an always-on wall display. Dockerized on a TrueNAS host with cached metadata enrichment, per-aircraft logo assets, and graceful fallbacks for unidentified traffic. Private installation; has achieved sustained household delight ratings that no other home service has matched.
Home Assistant instance coordinating smart-home devices on a network segment fully isolated from the primary LAN, because trusting consumer IoT on your main network is how horror stories start. Remote access rides a self-hosted WireGuard tunnel with port forwarding tuned for UDP traversal, so no cloud dependency, no third-party broker, no telemetry leaving the house. House logic stays local, automations stay fast, and the router stays unimpressed.
TrueNAS SCALE, mirrored ZFS, Docker orchestration with VPN-isolated network namespaces, Pi-hole, and WireGuard. Production habits, residential power bill.