I've Always Been Figuring Out a System Not Built for Me
When I was in sixth grade, I had to stack wood in the basement. The process was exactly as tedious as it sounds; haul it inside, carry it downstairs, stack it. So I started thinking about the treadmill we had sitting around, and whether I could rig it to run the wood into the house for me through the basement window. I was pulling apart RC cars around the same time, not to break them, but to see how they were built and whether I could use the pieces for something else.
Nobody asked me to do any of that. It's just how I'm wired.
By my sophomore year in high school, I'd built my first computer. My dad said he'd help me, but I got tired of waiting and found the parts myself. Born in 1985, so keep that timeline in mind. This wasn't a YouTube tutorial world. You figured it out or you didn't.
How It Actually Started
My dad is how I got into computers and electronics in the first place. He got me in at a company called Qualxserv doing warranty repair work — field tech stuff, hands-on, figuring out hardware problems on-site. That led to my first real helpdesk role at a law firm in Arizona. Five locations, around 500 employees, three people in IT. We did everything: printer repairs, furniture moves for office relocations, security camera installs, cable pulls. Whatever needed doing, we did it.
From there I landed at an HOA management company, a larger operation with more structure and vendors handling some of what we used to do ourselves. I was the new guy. Then the regional model kicked in, laid off my IT director, and my coworker looked at the situation, decided it was ridiculous, and found another job. So I absorbed it all.
That pattern of being handed more than the job description said and just handling it has repeated itself more than once.
The Job That Wasn't Supposed to Be a Senior Role
Halfway through my time there I was running the site solo: exchange servers, three office relocations with vendor meetings and rack layouts, hiring my own help desk tech when tickets stacked up past the point of reason. I reported to a regional IT director, but the working direction from him and the CFO was essentially: do what you gotta do.
I didn't have a senior title. I had a senior workload and figured it out anyway.
When they eventually decommissioned old hardware, nobody cared what happened to it. I took a server home.
Forum Printouts and a Minecraft Server
Toward the end of that stretch, before I moved back to Michigan, I stood up my first Ubuntu server on a decommissioned Dell. I ran a Minecraft server on it. This was still beta, before most people knew what Minecraft was. I hosted it for friends and family using Hamachi VPN. Alongside it, I also ran a TeamSpeak 3 server, which gave us voice chat without needing a third-party service. When I eventually moved back to Michigan and my family was still in Arizona, that server is how we stayed connected and played together across the country. I kept it running for a few years.
The way you learned to do that back then was to find a forum thread, print it out, and go execute it step by step. There was no AI to ask. There was no video walking you through it. You read, you tried, you broke something, you fixed it.
The instinct didn't go anywhere. Just the tools.
What Actually Changed (And What Didn't)
Today I'm building out a multi-domain home lab under TekForge: a Proxmox virtualization platform, identity-first infrastructure with SSO and centralized auth, service isolation patterns, documented as I go. I found AI in March 2025 and have built most of this since then. The difference between that era and this one is that I'm vibe coding instead of printing forum threads.
The tools lowered the floor. They did not replace the foundation.
Here's what that actually looks like in practice. After two or three attempts at the same problem, if I'm getting the same result with slightly different framing, I stop. I assess what's actually happening, form a theory about the real cause, and redirect:
We've tried this three times. It's the exact same thing. I think the actual issue is here.
New path, new troubleshooting steps, problem solved. That only works because I know what I'm looking at. I know what working looks like. I know what broken looks like. The AI doesn't catch the loop, I do.
Right now I can spin up a hardened VM in about an hour. Hostname, admin config, static IP, SSH hardening, all of it. AI helps me get there faster. But it's not doing the thinking. It's more like a second mind I can offload to — something that keeps up with how fast I move between things and helps me turn a half-formed idea into an executable plan.
You still need the background. You still need to know what bug you're looking for. You still need to understand what's actually working and what isn't.
The Through Line
I'm a systems administrator. I've done helpdesk. I've done warranty repair. I've run IT solo for a site of 300 people. I've run infrastructure for regulated manufacturing environments. And if you look at my resume, you might see a ladder.
What I see is a continuous thread that started with a treadmill and a stack of firewood. The instinct was always the same: make it work, make it better, understand how it's built. The tools just kept changing.
I've mostly spent my life figuring out how to work in a system not built for me.
I figured it out.