Infrastructure practice
I ran it at home before I ran it in production
Most of what I run in production I first ran, broke and hardened on my own hardware — which is why I can own the platform layer at work without a separate DevOps team.
Home lab and self-hosted infrastructure
- Run Raspberry Pi clusters and home servers as a permanent lab — hosting GitLab runners, sandbox and demo environments for my own products, and staging for architectures before they reach production.
- Built a power-management layer using Raspberry Pi Zeros and Wake-on-LAN to bring servers up and down on demand rather than leaving the estate powered continuously.
- Self-host and administer a game-server control panel, alongside a set of chat bots I built and run on my own servers.
Security, provisioning and virtualisation
- Provision and configure Linux servers start to finish — at home and in production — including reverse proxies, TLS termination, and network segmentation.
- Design and operate Proxmox virtual environments and LXC containers for both lab and company workloads.
- Automate provisioning and security hardening with Ansible, keeping environments reproducible rather than hand-tuned.
Observability and platform tooling
- Built Grafana dashboards backed by Prometheus for metrics and performance, in production and across the home estate.
- Instrument distributed systems with distributed tracing via Jaeger and .NET Aspire, making cross-service latency and failure paths visible rather than inferred.
- Operate Milvus for vector storage supporting AI and retrieval workloads.
Lab to production
What the practice actually pays for.
- Every infrastructure migration I have led at work — IIS to Docker, Docker to Kubernetes, monolith to event-driven — was rehearsed on this hardware before it touched a client-facing environment.
- Container orchestration, reverse proxying, and observability all reached my production estate through the lab first, which is why the platform layer at work needs no separate DevOps function.
- The same setup gives every product in my independent suite a real staging environment, so Notevex and Operavex ship against production-shaped infrastructure rather than a developer laptop.
Want the detail behind any of this?
A walkthrough or an architecture deep-dive of any system on this site can be arranged on request.