A bit about me
I'm Jamie, based in the UK. Away from a screen I'm usually gaming, out for a drive, playing table tennis, or down the pub - but professionally I work in infrastructure, and it's genuinely what I love.
I've been at it for the best part of a decade now, and almost all of it is self-taught - built up through doing the work, not sitting in a classroom waiting for someone to explain it.
By day that's my main job. On the side I also run JDB-NET , but this page is mostly about me rather than the business.
How I got here
It started the way these things often do: spare hardware sitting around and the urge to put it to use. A file share came first, then a basic Plex server, then my first hosted website - and somewhere along the way, leftover parts turned into a proper homelab.
What began as a hobby didn't stay one for long. The same curiosity that had me wondering whether old kit could still be useful slowly turned into a career - I was already doing the kind of work I ended up getting paid for, I just hadn't called it that yet. These days the homelab and the day job feed each other constantly, but the instinct underneath both is the same: figure out how things work, then make them work better.
What I actually do
No two weeks look quite the same, which is partly why I haven't got bored of it. One day I'm knee-deep in on-prem hardware or virtualisation, the next I'm untangling something in Kubernetes or tightening up monitoring and alerting. Automation and scripting creep in wherever they'll save future me some grief, security is always somewhere in the mix, and there's a fair bit of day-to-day user support thrown in.
I care about systems that stay up, are understandable when they don't, and aren't held together with hope and a wiki page nobody's updated since 2019. I'd rather understand a problem properly than slap a fix on it and move on. That sounds obvious written down, but you'd be surprised how often it isn't the default.
- Linux
- Proxmox
- Kubernetes
- Monitoring
- Automation
- On-prem
- Security
Coding
More of a side interest than a career path. I'll mess about in whatever language fits when something in my own setup needs fixing or I want an application to do something specific, but infrastructure is where my head actually lives. The projects page covers the things I've shipped publicly.
Away from all that
I'm mainly into simulation games and anything with a big open world to explore - the kind of thing where you can properly switch off and just wander around for a bit. There's usually music on in the background too; the genre depends entirely on what I'm doing that day.
When I'm not gaming, I'm probably driving somewhere for the sake of it, playing table tennis, or at the pub. The car page goes into more detail on the driving side if you're curious.