19 years in manufacturing 🏭 → pivoting into software & AI 💻
Ontario, Canada 📍 · Complexity impresses mediocre engineers. Simplicity impresses great ones.
Will trade code for good food 🍕

• Former manufacturing generalist turned self-taught developer - I spent nearly two decades learning how to make things work under real-world pressure before I ever touched a compiler
• Running two distinct homelabs: an AI inference stack on an HP ZGX Nano G1n (NVIDIA DGX Spark) - 128 GB unified memory, GB10 Grace-Blackwell SoC - and a fully hardened network/security lab on Proxmox VE 9
• Learning backend development on boot.dev - working toward Python and Linux certifications
• Philosophy: I feel more comfortable driving my car when I understand how the brakes work

A learning-first infrastructure project built around a single Proxmox VE 9 host. The goal is understanding every layer - no black boxes.

Hardware: Intel i5-12600K · 32 GB RAM · 931 GB NVMe · Intel i350-T4 quad-port NIC

What's running:

Security posture:

• 🛡️ Suricata IDS on MGMT bridge (Proxmox host) + IPS on WAN (OPNsense) - ET Open + abuse.ch rulesets
• 🔒 Inter-VLAN isolation: IoT/LAN segments cannot reach management infrastructure
• 🔑 PVE firewall restricts to trusted IPs only - default DROP
• 🔍 CVE tracking and remediation documentation maintained for every patched vulnerability
• 📡 Zero-trust remote access via Twingate - no VPN, no open ports for admin

Monitoring stack: Prometheus (60s scrape · 30-day retention) → Grafana dashboards for every host · Alertmanager → Telegram bot "Max" for InstanceDown, HighCPU, HighMemory, LowDisk alerts · Loki log aggregation from 4 hosts, 7 streams · 30-day retention

Languages & Scripting

Infrastructure & Containers

AI / Inference Stack

Databases & Memory

Networking & Security

Tools & Platforms

• 🤖 Runs Yuki - an on-device AI cat-girl with cross-session memory (BM25 + vector hybrid), a knowledge graph, background memory consolidation ("dreaming"), and TTS
• 🎨 ComfyUI handles image & video gen locally (FLUX, Z-Image Turbo, SageAttention-patched for SM121A)
• 🧠 Documenting everything - living docs, versioned architecture diagrams, CVE research summaries, phased restore scripts, and lessons-learned logs
• 🔒 Zero-trust remote access (Twingate), multi-VLAN OPNsense, supply-chain-aware upgrade discipline, and a habit of reading CVE advisories before they hit the news cycle
• 🐧 Upgraded a production Proxmox host from PVE 8 → PVE 9 (Debian 12 → 13 Trixie) in-place - then wrote up everything that broke and why
• 🎮 Running a dedicated MotorTown game server - because debugging a Steam + Proton + SteamAPI_Init() failure chain counts as Linux sysadmin experience
• ⚡ Can probably troubleshoot your network setup

Coming from a trade background means I think in systems - what fails, why it fails, what it takes to keep it running at 3am. I apply the same mindset to software: document before you forget, test before you ship, and know what every layer is actually doing. I don't trust a system I can't explain.

I run recon before I touch anything. I read the config file before I edit it. I write down what I learned even when nothing broke. And when something does break, I write down that too.

"Learn to manage AI, or AI will learn to manage you."

• GitHub: calico88x
• Telegram: @nova88x
• LinkedIn: @Nova Peck
• X: @xCalico88x
• YouTube: @pinkcalico88
• Suno: @xjustnova88

Thanks for stopping by! If you see something cool on this profile, just ask - I'm always happy to explain how it works.