>_ About

I started in IT by accident. I was a 3D animator and CG generalist who somehow ended up managing the render farm. From there I drifted into Engineering and never left.

Fifteen years later, I’m a Director of IT Operations in the creative industry, mostly in Mac-heavy environments and often as a department of one. My day might involve crawling under a desk to replace a cable, planning infrastructure, automating repetitive tasks, or figuring out why something that worked yesterday suddenly doesn’t today.

My homelab followed a similar path. It started with a retired 2012 Mac mini running ESXi, became two Mac minis, and today runs on a two-node Proxmox cluster built from HP EliteDesk mini PCs. Along the way I accumulated media servers, automation, monitoring, backups, and enough projects that I eventually had to start treating it like real infrastructure.

Outside of work, I spend far too much time on home automation and 3D printing. Most of what I print is functional: organizers, brackets, rack mounts, and whatever my kids dream up. My background in 3D modeling means many of those designs are my own.

This site is simply a collection of things I’ve learned: homelab projects, automation writeups, troubleshooting guides, 3D printing projects, and smart home experiments. None of it is intended to be groundbreaking. It’s just the documentation I wish I had found before spending an evening figuring something out myself.

If I have to solve the same problem twice, it probably belongs on this blog.

You can find me on GitHub, LinkedIn, and as paulco in the MacAdmins Slack.