My home for cataloging my fun projects and landing page for reviews to help my friends.
A collection of knowledge dumps, funny stories and general information. Over the years I have been an application developer, backend web designer, network admin, and SQL administrator.
At home I have created my own test rig for teaching myself new skills and keeping existing one fresh and current. I have worked with industrial controllers, small embedded micro-controllers, raspberry Pi's, network routing equipment, and Windows Servers.
I currently work for a furniture distributor as the Reporting Manager and SQL Server Administrator for over 20 years. For a short while I was a developer in Sweden for, at the time, the largest internet development firm in Europe. Now I am enjoying the chaotic environment of rapid application changes to support an import business in the face of an unknown import tariff situation.
Fun Stuff.
In the course of my daily life, I have been asked what I use or what I recommend. Here is my list of current products I have either directly purchased and used, recommended to immediate family, or colleagues.
These items have affiliate links to Amazon.com where I purchase most of my new technology, or EBay.com for my secondhand used equipment.
About 50% of my home lab is recycled equipment from data centers. I have found in the past these were great resources for enterprise equipment on the cheap. However, now with the advent of more modern processors,
I have been moving my home lab equipment to mini pc. They are extremely fast, use very little power, and perform as well as equipment just 7 years old.
Technology has been changing that fast over the past few years.
I have done some fun projects over the years to either entertain myself or solve an issue for work or family. I wired my whole house with ethernet, built a refrigerated server room, coded and built control systems for a flight simulator.
For work I designed, coded and built a testing rig for furniture safety using an Arduino, pneumatic controls, custom windows C# application and a one-week time constraint.
I have a home lab that I am using to teach myself Proxmox as our firm is in the process of exiting the VMWare ecosystem. Learning and testing bring in equipment and virtual servers into the new environment.
Finding out pinch points and documenting my mistakes along the way, so when we do port our production environment to Proxmox, all the hard lessons will have been learned in advance.