Homelab and Infrastructure
My homelab is both a workshop and a proving ground.
What It Is
Cloud Infrastructure is the foundational components required to build and operate cloud-based systems. On this site, it matters because it transfers across technical, operational, and venture work instead of staying trapped in one narrow context.
Learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
In My Own Words
“Knowing how these systems work with other systems, and which tools and sub-products should be chosen and not used — that’s a big part of it. I can steer clients away from technology that looks like it might work but won’t actually work for their application.” Full transcript on the AWS page.
Kubernetes systems
Container orchestration platforms schedule workloads, manage service discovery, and enforce desired state across clusters of compute resources.
NGINX
NGINX is a web server and reverse proxy for high-performance applications.
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.
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.
Routing systems (BGP, etc.)
Distributed decision systems determine network paths based on policy and topology, balancing reachability, performance, and control.
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...
Security & Permission Systems
Frameworks control access to systems and data across overlapping teams, tools, and projects.
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.
Storage systems
Persistence layers provide durability, availability, and performance through replication, partitioning, and tiering.