From a box of dead PCs to a 42U rack

It started in 2003, when I was eight. A relative bought around fifty dead Celeron-era PCs at a school auction and handed twenty off to me because he had no use for them. I had zero computer experience and no internet at home, so my father drove me to the library, where I checked out Upgrading and Repairing PCs — and quietly "forgot" to return it for months. By week three I had one machine booting to BIOS, and understood why. By the end of that graveyard, I had six working systems built from parts everyone else had written off as trash.

My father — self-taught in HTML and early Java himself — walked through everything alongside me: jumpers, formatting, OS installs. Once I had a small fleet running, I remembered seeing a "Multiplayer" option in Age of Empires II, a game we always played solo. Back to the library, this time for networking. A cheap Linksys router and a few days of trial and error later, I'd built our first home LAN — four generations of the same family playing Age of Empires II in one room.

That habit never stopped. Middle and high school added early web/graphic design coursework (Illustrator, Photoshop, a hand-managed school website), and once I had real home internet I was hosting my own game servers, running TeamSpeak/Ventrilo communities, and — by working through the practical realities of routing, port forwarding, and DNS to keep those servers online for real users — learning networking the way it actually sticks: by being the one who has to fix it when it breaks. That period also built genuinely capable custom PCs, first for myself, then for friends — eventually hundreds of builds over two decades.

I enrolled in a Network Specialist program to move toward the enterprise side of the field, and kept living the material well beyond the classroom: real commercial routers, switches, and servers under a wood-framed rack I built myself, VMware ESXi virtualization, Windows Server shares, and hands-on Active Directory and Group Policy work I've kept sharpening ever since. As Discord replaced self-hosted voice servers, I moved with it — standing up communities and building genuinely sophisticated bots: automated moderation, activity-based rewards, and fully automated subscription key/licensing systems, the same category of infrastructure now running Elite Level Software's commercial backend.

More recently that's expanded into the modern Microsoft stack — Microsoft 365 administration, hybrid identity through Entra Connect, licensing, and Exchange. And the home lab kept growing: a self-designed 42U rack now runs pfSense as the primary router/firewall, commercial Cisco PoE switching, multiple dedicated wireless access points, and an enterprise storage tier — a Dell PowerEdge R730XD running TrueNAS, expanded with three Dell MD1200 JBOD shelves. Real VLANs, real redundancy planning, real day-to-day administration of hardware most people only see in a data center.

Today I'm genuinely enthusiastic about what AI (Claude, Gemini, GPT) makes possible — the same way that library book opened doors for an eight-year-old in 2003. I still design the architecture, debug the hard problems, and own every decision; AI is the resource that sharpens my accuracy, speeds up execution, and surfaces tools and approaches I might not have found on my own. Growing up without internet access and a single borrowed book, that kind of accessibility is something I care about — I try to build the resources now that I wish I'd had then.