About

I'm a dad and spend my free time learning and building things. Whether it's renovating a vintage caravan, building an ESP32 powered PWM interface for my kitchen's LED dimmers or fixing a cubby house.

I have run a homelab for over 20 years where I started with early versions of now mainstream software such as ESX 2.5.0, RedHat Linux 5.0 (yes 5.0 Hurricane, not RHEL!), Softgrid and Citrix Presentation Server. It's grown up and down in that time and moved from the UK to Australia (yes I had a full 42U Rack go in a shipping container!). The lab has been instrumental to keeping my knowledge up to date and importantly (to me) widely varied. Of course the homelab looks very different these days but VMware has remained a constant and now running a much more recent vSphere release!

I am IT infrastructure 'specialist generalist'. In recent years I've been focussed on hybrid cloud automation and platform engineering. I love to dive deep into complex IT infrastructure problems that few dare tackle!

I run talktosam, an informal technology advisory company specialising in helping others build low-maintenance and intuitive technology systems.