From my tinkering and natural curiosity, I became familiar with basic IT concepts in networking, Linux and infrastructure at the age of 11.

Over the years I’ve delved deeper into this rabbit hole setting up a homelab and learning to administer servers in production environments, where my skills, knowledge and practical experience has grown exponentially.

Real world Experience#

  • Designed, deployed and still actively maintaining a free game server hosting platform (Using Pterodactyl Panel & Wings) for various communities peaking at 50+ members, recieved tons of positive feedback about performance and reliability especially when using my homelab, also operated additional regions on rented ryzen boxes.
  • Actively operating and maintaining a prosumer level homelab to experiment with technologies and run services for personal use, small communities or friends (Proxmox VE & backup server with sophisticated monitoring, mobile notification alerts and proper disaster recovery following the 3-2-1 backup strategy).
  • Built a Discord Bot used by 40+ servers and hosted it on a DigitalOcean vps deployed via Docker made in Python with MongoDB - Source Code.

General Knowledge#

  • Built and configured multiple custom pcs (Towers, Custom Rackmount Servers).
  • Replaced specific parts in pcs (Graphics Cards, NVMe SSDs, Hard drives, SATA SSDs and Power Supplys).
  • Familiar with setting up Windows 10, 11 and other operating systems such as Linux on various sets of hardware.
  • Comfortable configuring BIOS/UEFI settings, installing and updating drivers.
  • Experienced with Proxmox VE (Type 1) and Virtualbox (Type 2) virtualization.
  • Troubleshooted dozens of issues with desktop machines and servers (Windows & Linux).

Networking#

  • Designing, configuring and troubleshooting my home network (Subnetting, Router configuration, Static IPs, Port forwarding and Wireless APs/Wi-Fi).
  • Knowledge of IP Addresses (Public & Private), NAT, Ports, DNS, Routers/Modems, Firewalls, TCP/UDP, Subnets and SSL Certificates.
  • Setup VPNs to securely access internal homelab resources like SSH and Admin Dashboards (Tailscale, Self-hosted Wireguard, Cloudflare Tunnels/Access).

Systems & Infrastructure#

  • Implemented sophisticated monitoring and alerting systems with hetrixtools (previously using uptime kuma, but lacks heartbeat monitoring or resource monitor) to monitor uptime, resource usage and self-hosted ntfy to get mobile notifications.
  • Operated and secured dozens of servers (Bare Metal, VMs and VPSes) running various linux distros (Ubuntu LTS, Debian, Fedora Server, CoreOS).
  • Proficient in the Linux command line and filesystem navigation.
  • Familiar with various package managers (apt, dnf).
  • Familiar with industry standard security practices on production machines (SSH Keys, Fail2Ban, No root login, Firewalls).
  • Docker Container deployment, management and building on Windows (Docker Desktop) and Multiple linux distros (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora).
  • Maintained tons of vps servers on various cloud platforms (DigitalOcean, Linode, AWS Lightsail, GCP & BinaryLane).
  • Reverse proxy setup & configuration (Nginx, Caddy).
  • Ability to setup and use S3/Object Storage buckets with experience on various providers (Self-Hosted Minio, DigitalOcean Spaces, OVH Object Storage, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Linode Object Storage).

Web & Cloud Development#

  • Used Git, GitHub and other providers including self-hosted Gitea, GitLab and Forgejo.
  • Website deployment using Cloudflare/GitHub pages (Static sites) and Docker Containers (Flask, FastAPI, Express.js).
  • Domain/DNS management (Cloudflare, Namecheap & cPanel).
  • Setting up and configuring Wordpress sites on shared hosting (cPanel) and Self-hosted/VPS (Docker & Caddy/Nginx).
  • Python, HTML & CSS (Flask & FastAPI sites, Discord Bots, Miscellaneous Scripts and Static Websites).
  • Built projects with Python (Flask/FastAPI apps, Discord bots, automation scripts) and web technologies (HTML, CSS).
  • Experience operating MariaDB and MongoDB servers for self-hosted services & small projects (Primarily in Docker).