/about

I've spent over 25 years in enterprise networking technology; starting as a systems engineer at Cisco, working some of the largest service provider and financial services accounts in the world, and eventually moving into customer success at Red Hat in Canada. I've seen what happens when infrastructure works at scale. More importantly, I've seen what happens when it doesn't.

The frustration that started this blog was specific. I kept watching AI-generated code get celebrated as finished work; scripts that worked once, containers that didn't scale, systems that collapsed under real conditions. Everyone was talking about the speed of AI. Nobody was talking about what happens after the prompt window closes.

I wanted to document a different approach. One grounded in 25 years of learning what it actually takes to build systems that run in production, at scale, under pressure, in the hands of real customers.

So I built a homelab on a couple of Raspberry Pi 5s and old Lenovo laptops. Then I built this site to document what I'm learning along the way.

Twenty-five years of enterprise technology taught me one thing above all else: the gap between a demo and a production system is where most projects fail. AI changes how fast you can get to the demo. It does not close that gap.

Linux, systems thinking, open source, and engineering discipline — these are what close the gap. That's what gets built here.