Senior Design Begins

And off to the races we go!

I've just returned to the college campus for what I believe will be the final time in my life. Learning more at Tesla and at the North American Open Source Summit, I've returned a bit refreshed with more life experience.

Amidst all these experiences, I gained a valuable skill. I've learned to zoom out and see the entire picture. Whether you're a "cog in the wheel" or higher up at any job, if you can see the larger picture as to how you influence the entire business machine that is your company, you'll succeed in life. Definitely looking forward to future opportunities I have to see such machines gain momentum as I begin talking to some startup founders in the future and further networking outside of schoolwork and Senior Design.

Senior Design is the "final stretch" so to speak, for kids at my college. I've been in college since 2012 and I'll be more than thankful when this hellish landscape of outdated classes, hit or miss professors and insane bills is over. My group's project involves miniaturizing and simplifying the "sandbox" environment we use at college to learn systems administration basics. I'll definitely be open sourcing my code over on my Github (link on website) so stay tuned for that! Off to the races!

Some developments

Recently I've mainly been focusing on some open source projects I've been helping my friends out with, working on dashboarding and on-call automation at a Tesla internship and attempting to finish Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild.

I gotta say, as much as I love Nintendo games, damn that one is a bit more brutal than previous iterations! Previously, you could actually manage to live for a while in Zelda games...now it's as if Nintendo partnered with From Software...Nonetheless, onward with more tech blather.

I've recently been working on more self-hosted things. I'm likely going to host my own Sandstorm instance with Rocket.Chat and some other apps on there when I get back home in August from California. The Factorio Ansible playbooks that I somewhat talked about here on another page are still in development- Ansible can further my understanding of how automation can be used in both personal and professional environments. I'm also looking into Terraform to see how, upon return to the midwest and my homelab, I can map out my infrastructure for future reference.

Outside of homework and open source projects, those playbooks and tools I covered...I haven't done much outside of work at Tesla. I'll update this again when I get time...usually once a month.

Work Work Work!

Hello again all. It's been quite a while since I've updated this space. I've been working on quite a few things for Tesla now that I'm out here working for them. I got an extension on my original contract to work out here and now I'll be out here till August! Woo hoo!

I've worked on lots of things out here so far, from working on Model 3 infrastructure in the factory, to keeping sites up, to learning Ansible for mass provisioning and integrating it with Jenkins for version control, to learning how to setup a dashboard when a team has no clients or anything to plug into other than networking switches at multiple locations. Learning a lot of varied tools that helpdesk, sysadmin and DevOps have all used in the past while here!

Here's to looking forward to the future and the side projects I can work on when I get home!

Going Well

Things are going at Tesla. Working on a lot of things that can't be mentioned, though I will say that I'm learning a lot about certain tools.

In my freetime and at work I'm learning a lot about how Ansible and Jenkins can work together to automate tons of stuff. Also learning on my own how I can use Ansible in Vultr's cloud to configure and rollout factorio instances that are pre-setup. I've heard of a tool called Terraform while I'm in Silicon Valley so I'll definitely look into that quite a bit as well.

As things stand, the homelab has been left back in the midwest. Unplugged and only half-configured, I think it will have to wait until I return home from this co-op. Once I'm back I will definitely begin using GitLab or BitBucket and throw a ton of repos on there that I can tinker with and host on my own systems.

Hope all is going well out there in the rest of the world!

A New Chapter

While still working- rushing- to get my homelab remotely accessible in time before I fly out to San Francisco to intern at Tesla Motors, I'm struggling with balancing hanging out with friends, playing Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and working on this homelab. So many friends and family want to say hello before I leave for five months.

Sorry for the few updates, I just haven't found time to update this site in a while. The holidays are quite busy. Looking forward to seeing what this new job, albeit temporary, on the West Coast brings. I've needed a break like this for a while. The slow, bureaucracy-filled norm that I'm used to with companies I've worked for in the Midwest will likely have no place out at Tesla if I'm hearing correctly. Here's my chance to work somewhere great and bring back a different mentality to the Midwest.

Happy holidays everyone and I'll see you in the new year!