Adventurous Vagabond • Cloud-Native Polyglot • Homelab Hooplehead
I thrive in the weird and wild corners of the tech world. To me, computing is about the natural curiosity of how things work—and how they can be made better. From orchestrating container lifecycles to hardening network firewalls, I build resilient digital ecosystems that bridge the gaps between scripts, hardware, ML, and automation.
- The Nomad Frontier: Scaling a high-availability cluster across a trio of on-prem, at-home PCs.
- GitOps & Automation: Refining Kustomize and Consul to ensure everything is versioned, verified, and just_works™.
- Network Hardening: Deep-diving into firewall resilience to create a fort for cloud and self-hosted services.
- Artifact Musing: Digging into the aelder magick—Unix, Vim, Bash, Git, and the unforgiving edges that keep us connected.
I believe in keeping my tools sharp and my environments reproducible. You can find my system configurations here: 👉 jharter1/configs — Where the hacky meets the refined.
I’m inspired by the pioneers who viewed computing as a tool for human progress and a playground for the mind.
- Resilience: Building systems that survive the chaos of digital gremlins and physical disasters.
- Security: Implementing secrets management because "good enough" isn't quite good, or enough.
- The Hacker Ethic: Pursuing technical elegance not for the sake of the market, but for the sake of the craft.
I’m always open to chatting about cloud-native patterns, homelab hardware, or the best Midwestern craft brews.
Based in Cook County, IL. If you're in town, let's grab a beer, a coffee, or hit the trail for a run.
- 🌐 Linktree — Socials, contact, and more.
- 🏗️ Status: Open to collaboration on open-source projects or networking architecture.
Fun Fact: My current production stack is a Proxmox VE cluster running Nomad on three Lenovo ThinkCentre micros. It used to live on an M1 Mac Mini, but Apple doesn't really jive with screwdrivers or upgrades. This setup gives me the freedom to break things, expand, and gradually master the Hashicorp ecosystem.
