About

Notes from a life spent building, breaking and fixing things.

Hey — I'm J. I've spent more than twenty-two years in IT, and I still get the same kick out of it that I did the first time something I built actually worked.

By day I'm a senior Kubernetes escalation engineer on a major cloud provider's containers team — the person who gets the tickets after the tickets. By night (and, honestly, most weekends) I run a homelab that got a little out of hand: a Proxmox box, a bunch of Raspberry Pis that never sleeps, a bag of travel routers, ten free-tier cloud servers on two continents, and a fleet of AI agents that help keep it all running.

This blog is where I write it all down.

How I got here

While I've always been a tinkerer and on the computer, I didn't start in the cloud. Professionally, I started in telecom, moved into systems administration – it was already a hobby why not. I then worked my way into cloud-native engineering — containers, infrastructure as code, and eventually Kubernetes. Security was also strong in my background early on. Along the way I picked up certifications across Azure, AWS and Google Cloud, plus GIAC GSEC, GIAC GCLD, and Security+.

The thread through all of it: make the thing work, then make it reliable, then make it so the next person understands it.

What you'll find here

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The Lab, Logged — a series that walks through my homelab one piece at a time: the Tailscale fabric everything sits on, a Docker host running 90-plus containers, a Kubernetes cluster spread across four cloud regions, my AI agent fleet, and the security layer watching all of it.

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Build logs — projects from idea to working thing. Sometimes I get to thinking I need something? Let's bring it to life. Bugs included. :-D

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Everything in between — lessons from two decades, learning and mentoring, and whatever else I'm tinkering with. Not every post is about Kubernetes.

The lab at a glance: 10 cloud instances, 4 regions, 90-plus containers on one box, 12 AI agents, one tailnet

How I write

Real systems, real mistakes. If something took me three tries, you'll see all three.
Honest about status. I mark what's running, what's half-done and what's still a plan.
Security-minded by default. I describe machines by what they do, not what they're called, and I scrub addresses, IDs and ports from everything, fellow tinfoil hat wearer?
Code you can use. Snippets are there to be copied — adapt them to your own setup.

How this site is built

Fittingly, it runs in the lab: Ghost on a Raspberry Pi, reached through a tunnel instead of an open port, with a theme I'm building myself. If the site is ever down, there's a decent chance I'm writing the post about why.

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Opinions here are my own and don't represent my employer. Everything described runs on my own time, on my own hardware and free-tier accounts.