About Me

The Origin Story

Born in 1989. I am roughly the same age as the World Wide Web itself — Tim Berners-Lee released the first web server in 1989, and I was born the same year. This is not a coincidence.

My grandfather was a Canadian National Rail technician, and my father worked in technical roles for government subcontractors my entire upbringint. I spent my childhood in my dad’s workshop, watching him repair things and solder electronics. That hands-on curiosity — understanding how things are built and how they break — became my compass. The world has always made more sense to me when I can take it apart and see what makes the gears turn. I’ve always said the joke that i understand computers and machines more than humans, because it is true.

In my late teens and early 20s, I built and sold over 150 computer custom systems. I was also installing car stereos and solar systems in my early to mid 20s. I got into Bitcoin mining as early as 2011, and again in 2014, which is a part of why I got so deep into homelabbint setups. Not to mention the fact that over my lifetime i’ve also turned into a gearhead and do my own mechanical work. Started with breaks and struts and and simple things in my 20s to replacing wheel bearings, entire suspension setups, re-gearing differentials, and replacing a head gasket, and although I’ve now owned 13 vehicles in my 2 decades of having a license, a lot of this was on my 1987 Toyota Motorhome, which is hella badass. I vanlifed a year in that thing driving down to Mexico from Canada.

I built my first computer at 16, saving from my line cook job at a local sports bar. High school brought Myspace HTML customizations, Geocities where I was hosting keyloggers with the intention of stealing video game accounts, and I’d occasionally get the odd bank account login info, lol, so I grew up knowing that the internet was both a playground and a minefield.

Education & Background

Electromechanical Tech — Trade school taught me machining, welding, electronics, hydraulics, pneumatics, and electricity. This gives me a physical-layer intuition that most software engineers lack. I understand how bits move through logical systems because I’ve seen how electrons move through physical circuits. While my peers were learning to write APIs, I was learning to read schematics. Turns out they’re the same skill, just different voltage.

Systems and Processes Engineering — This framework wraps around my technical passion. It’s about understanding systems of people, machines, processes, resources, and money. CI/CD pipelines are factory floors. Data is raw material. The drive for operational efficiency never changes. Whether you’re running a assembly line or a Kubernetes cluster, the principles are the same: reduce friction, eliminate waste, and don’t trust anything that can’t be measured.

The NixOS Epiphany

After years of managing Linux servers by hand — fixing broken configs, dealing with dependency conflicts, and sometimes accidentally breaking things — I discovered NixOS. It changed everything.

Think about it: for decades, we’ve been treating operating systems like houseplants. You water them, you hope for the best, and when they die, you mourn and reformat. NixOS said: what if your OS was code?

NixOS lets you:

• Declare your entire OS configuration in code
• Version control your operating system in Git
• Rebuild atomically with instant rollbacks
• Reproduce any system from its config alone
• CI/CD deploy your entire infrastructure

This is what I bring to every engagement: the ability to treat your infrastructure as code, with the reliability and reproducibility that comes from declarative configuration. Your servers become as predictable as a function — same input, same output, every time. No more “but it works on my machine” — because your machine is your machine, declared in a file that lives in Git.

Current Stack

Why Hire Me?

1. Deep IT knowledge — I’ve been working with computers since the dial-up era. I understand the stack from the hardware to the application layer. I’ve seen computers go from having nothing but a terminal interface, to what we have now, which is an insane amount of computational capacity available for free or cheap to anyone and easily accessible from your pocket. I don’t chase trends — Often times I’m ahead of them and might even move on from them before most do, because I can see what will survive them.

2. Infrastructure as Code — I don’t just configure servers; I declare their existence. Your infrastructure becomes reproducible, version-controlled, and auditable. Every change is tracked, every deployment is easily reversible. A deployment using a vetted configuration takes minutes to set up, not hours. An infra-wide steady state becomes easier to acheive and manage when you are managing everything from a central codebase. The learning curve may be steep, but it sure is worthwhile.

3. Cost-conscious — I run my entire personal infrastructure on major cloud provider’s free tier. I know how to maximize value while minimizing costs. There’s nothing wrong with paying for quality — but there’s nothing right about paying for waste. I treat your money like my own: carefully, and with a healthy skepticism of anything billed by the hour.

4. Security-focused — All my traffic routes through a West Montreal datacenter with encrypted DNS. No ISP or government or datacenter routing my requests knows what sites I visit. Seeing as I host my own email server, it has full SPF, DKIM, and DMARC with reporting so I know my domain is secure. Security isn’t an afterthought — it’s the default setting. I sleep fine at night because I built the locks myself.

5. Versatile — From bare-metal system installs for virtualiztion hosts or powerful workstation computers, to CDN/edge/multi-region cloud based microservice orchestration, to patching or updating code for various systems programming languages — I adapt to whatever your stack needs, as long as it’s relatively open source and I am given a fair amount of freedom to do my work. When it comes to tech, I am far from being a specialist. I guess you can say my specialty is tech, but within tech, I am an extremely versatile generalist.

What I’ll Tell You That Won’t Be On a Resume

I’ve been online for nearly 30 years. That means I’ve survived the dot-com crash, a seemingly never ending financial crisis of sorts, and enough social media and trendy platform pivots to fill a book. I’ve seen companies rise and fall on hype cycles that promised to “revolutionize” something that even something like Excel already did better.

I have opinions. Some are unpopular. I’ll tell you when your architecture is over-engineered or I think you’re using the wrong tools for the job, especially if graet open source alternatives exist and I think you’re paying for tools you don’t need, or when “moving to the cloud” means nothing more than one person’s computer is now another person’s computer, but somewhere else.

I prefer clean code, clear thinking, and people who can explain technical concepts without hiding behind buzzwords. I believe the best engineers are the ones who can communicate clearly — because if you can’t explain your system to someone outside it, it is of my opinion that you simply don’t understand it well enough, or maybe lack the language to do so, but that’s anthoter topic entirely and has to do with education and the general populations disinterest in reading, which if you can tell by my website, is an issue with me.

I like quiet infrastructure — systems that just work, so you don’t have to think about them. I like dark humor, sci-fi, and the satisfaction of a well-written bash script that does in three lines what would take a PowerPoint deck to explain.

If you need someone who treats your infrastructure like a zen garden — every rock in its place, every path intentional, everything in balance — let’s talk.