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acaylor · senior platform engineer

This site is a personal blog focused on software, technology, and the cloud. The main purpose is to share what I'm running at home and what I learned getting it to stay up.

fig. 0 — operator portraitgithub.com/acaylor · gitlab.com/acaylor

[INFO] Currently a Senior Platform Engineer. I enjoy working with the latest technology in my homelab and writing posts that survive past the first edit.

[WARN] comments are disabled. The previous platform added ads and there was no engagement. write directly if you have something to say. I appreciate folks who have reached out over the years.

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ayyyj@icloud.com

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.ayyj

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acaylor

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acaylor

The lab began with the first-model Raspberry Pi while I was in school. I wrote a version of Snake in Java, compiled it to a jar, dropped it on the Pi behind an Apache web server, and used a proxy so I could pull it down from anywhere. That hooked me on networking and self-hosting.

I set up an Ubuntu NAS with SMB and moved everything off the Pi. My coursework was Java until a final web-dev class that ran on ASP.NET. My capstone project was a meal-prep app with a recipe database which was the first time I used git to collaborate.

First job was Windows AD plus a Linux HPC fleet. I ran a Dell PowerEdge R510 at home with ESXi and Windows VMs for AD lab work. Every job after has been Linux-shaped. Around 2018 I moved the lab to Proxmox and TrueNAS. Later jobs centered on Kubernetes, so the lab followed with Ubuntu VMs running k8s clusters. Now I am running a mix of Raspberry Pis and Proxmox VMs with k3s.

[INFO] scanning hardware ...

[NOTE] power draw offset by solar · wireguard for remote · password manager for secrets

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