You found the section most people scroll past. I appreciate the curiosity - so here’s the version of me that doesn’t fit in a performance review.
The Direct One in the Room
I default to saying the thing everyone’s thinking but no one’s saying. It makes meetings shorter and occasionally makes the room go quiet. I’m told this is both my superpower and my development area - which sounds about right. The leaders I admire most are the ones who figured out how to be radically clear without being unkind, and I work on that gap every day.
My Other Job (Unpaid, 24/7, No PTO) 💻
I run a Homelab that started as “just one Raspberry Pi” and somehow became a 2U rackmount server, three MiniPCs, more Raspberry Pis, and a dedicated AI server with AMD Strix Halo. My family uses it daily. I use it to break things and learn how to fix them.
| Service | What It Does (And Why I Built It) |
|---|---|
| Vaultwarden | Self-hosted password vault. I don’t have enough trust to store my private keys on someone else’s servers - call it paranoia, I call it engineering. |
| AdGuard Home | Network-wide ad blocking. My family now believes the internet just doesn’t have ads. I haven’t corrected them. |
| Immich | Self-hosted family photos. I don’t need fancy features - I just want full control of my family’s data without a cloud provider training models on my kid’s face. |
| Generative AI stack | Agents, workflows, and a chat interface. Things that used to take me hours a day are now done in minutes. Best ROI of any server I’ve built. |
Every migration gone wrong and every 2 AM debugging session builds the kind of intuition that documentation can’t teach. That’s the whole point of a Homelab - it’s a controlled environment where failure is the curriculum.
Risk, Patience, and Better Leaders
I got into value investing in 2018 (Adam Khoo) and price action trading in 2019 (Alson Chew). Both changed how I think about risk, position sizing, and patience - skills that transfer directly to engineering leadership, product bets, and knowing when not to ship. Today I actively trade crypto (BTC, ETH, BNB, DOT) where the market punishes emotional decisions in real time. It’s the best training ground for the kind of discipline that matters everywhere else.
Let’s Talk
Whether it’s engineering, leadership, or just comparing Homelab setups - I’m always up for a conversation with people who build things.
