Photo Sharing Site — Self-Hosted
Built and ran a self-hosted photo sharing platform before cloud storage made it trivial — covering web dev, storage, auth, and the enduring question of how to make a growing photo library actually useful.
What It Is
Multiple coordinated nodes operate under partial failure, requiring replication, coordination, and fault tolerance to deliver reliable global behavior.
What This Domain Trains You To Notice
This domain is valuable because software and platform systems make interfaces explicit. They reveal how modules compose, where abstractions leak, how change propagates, and how operational discipline keeps complex systems evolvable.
Why It Transfers
The same lens transfers far beyond software. Once you can reason about state, isolation, coordination, and failure here, you are better prepared to understand teams, institutions, and other layered systems. This domain gets more useful when it is compared with adjacent systems instead of being treated as a silo. That is where reusable judgment starts to form.
Related Domains
Praxis — The Magnolia Homelab
A 4-node Proxmox cluster running Kubernetes, Ceph, site-to-site VPNs to AWS, GitOps pipelines, and a full observability stack — built to test every architecture I recommend to clients.
Proxmox Virtual Environment
Proxmox VE is the open-source hypervisor and clustering platform running my homelab — the environment where I test every architecture before recommending it to a client.
Scaling to Millions of Loan Customers
A multi-year initiative to scale a cloud-native, serverless loan management platform on AWS for a student and consumer debt company. Wrote Architecture...
Self Beacon Tracking (iBeacon)
Experimented with iBeacon transmitters placed around the house to track room-by-room location before indoor positioning was a product category.
The Homelab
Projects building and operating personal infrastructure — servers, clusters, networks, and the experiments that run on them.
Virtualization (Conceptual Understanding)
Virtualization (Conceptual Understanding) is an abstracting computing resources to improve flexibility and efficiency.
VMware ESXi
VMware ESXi is an enterprise hypervisor for virtualization.
WiFi Security Research — ESP8266 & Rotating MAC Addresses
A proof of concept using ESP8266 microcontrollers to demonstrate that rotating MAC addresses can still be fingerprinted via broadcast SSIDs.