My name is Grey. I live on the beautiful west coast of Canada and I'm driven to understand how things work. This curiosity is fairly broad and ranges from the chemistry of sourdough bread, to the physics of sailing, to RAID and error-checking in data storage. In university, I studied authenticity and bringing a sense of play to our everyday lives.
In IT, I've been exploring a Linux-based self-hosted infrastructure and I've been working alongside project-coordinators to improve IT processes. From this experience, I've learned that I enjoy:
- Exploring the wonderful and wacky world of opensource software.
- Supporting decision-makers by serving as an interface to low-level technical details.
- Designing bash scripts, documentation, processes, and diagrams as code.
- Testing bugs and establishing the steps to replicate them reliably.
- Spending time with people who are excited to share what they're learning!
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I feel exceptionally lucky to work with opensource. I get to help maintain communal resources and witness other curious generous people doing the same. Even when describing how to replicate a bug1, I have a sense of contributing to something greater. I'm excited to keep learning and contributing2.
If you're interesting in working together, then please reach out! (radarsymphony at protonmail dot com)
The following are some projects I've completed for clients.
- Migrated company's email data out of google into self-hosted solution by leveraging imapsync and bash scripting3.
- Migrated company 3cx VOIP system out of AWS to self-managed VPS.
- Managed and provisioned Docker-based applications using CLI and Traefik proxy.
- Automated tasks and linked business processes with bash scripting and GUI tools like n8n.
- Created various bash scripts to query an LDAP server and send emails with msmtp (e.g., confirm user info in DB, monitor mailbox size, send documents from filesystem).
- Designed a process for quickly creating infrastructure diagrams using Structurizr to host C4 inspired diagrams. This included dividing the code into modules and templates to make diagrams consistent and maintainable.
- Designed an incident response and escalation procedure and trained team through lessons and drills.
- Designed a release-management system for monitoring and categorizing new releases into priority levels.
- Helped team members learn Linux CLI, basic docker management, and how to use git to build new skills and create their first pull requests.
Here are some of the projects I'm working on to develop my skills and improve the tech-related tools I use.
- Transition to self-hosting my data on a Raspberry Pi.
- Build blog using Hugo static site generator hosted on github.io deployed by github actions.
- Flashing opensource firmware (ddwrt, openwrt) onto routers to enable increased networking functionality.
- Configure Tailscale and Headscale to run in Docker containers using host networking on Oracle Cloud VPS and personal devices.
- Refine my custom keyboard layout (based on Colemak-DH) for better ergonomics and i3wm integration. Translate this layout into a config file for Keyd so that I can use the same keylayout for my laptop.
- Example bug reports: Bookstack issue, Nextcloud issue, Freescout issue
- I'm intrigued by how the opensource community manages these common resources. How does the opensource community mitigate "the tragedy of the commons" and how is it still susceptible? What takeaways are useful in others areas of life? Yes, these "resources" are digital and perhaps not constrained by the same laws that govern natural resources. But they are resources that take maintenance and management. They require people to coordinate and communicate. And the health of the resource is often dependent on how people give back.
- I was later able to use Imapsync and bash scripting to salvage IMAP data from a corrupted MariaDB instance.