About

I am a tinkerer, builder, hacker, but above all, a lover of everything computers.

It all started as a kid poking around C:\Windows\System32, running QuickBASIC code I didn’t understand, copying Excel formulae from books I couldn’t read. But computers were with me in all stages of life. I was writing web pages in dumbphones, learning jQuery from W3Schools, rooting Android, installing custom ROMs from XDA, building robots with Arduino, dual booting Ubuntu with Windows.

Eventually, I pursued a bachelor’s degree in computer science from University of Maryland, College Park. I hated tests and quizzes, but I enjoyed learning software construction and the inner workings of computers.

During this period, I also worked as a systems administrator in UMD’s computing research institute, UMIACS. This was my initiation into the world of enterprise computing. This was a diverse job that entailed everything from help desk support to data center management, SLURM cluster deployment, AV facility management, Podman containerization, Puppet configuration management, vSphere and KVM virtualization, Python and Django app development, scale-out NAS operations, printer management, backups, object storage, and web hosting. I could not have asked for a better training ground.

Currently, I am an infrastructure engineer at CoStar Group, the company that owns Apartments.com. I lucked out again since my team shares a broad spectrum of responsibilities. I get to play with data centers, virtualization, VDI, blade server systems, storage arrays, scale-out NAS, tape libraries, backups, Packer, Ansible, Terraform, PowerShell, and EC2 Image Builder.

But you can’t expect work to scratch every itch. I need a dose of everything like DevOps, networking, authentication, and AI. That’s why I’m a homelabber. The backbone of my homelab is an Asus wireless router, a Raspberry Pi 4 LTS running Ubuntu, an Asus laptop running Proxmox VE, and a custom tower server running TrueNAS SCALE. But here I can play with Docker, Docker Swarm, Tailscale, Traefik, Kubernetes, Home Assistant, ZFS, Cloudflare, Pi-Hole, LLMs, and everything you can self-host.

After years of exposure to technology, I feel like sharing my thoughts every now and then. That is why I created this blog. Hopefully you’re still reading. 🙂

Credit where it’s due. Website theme: hugo-theme-chirpy