Short story
My interest in computers goes back to tinkering with Windows XP and VirtualBox — installing, breaking and reinstalling operating systems just to understand how they really worked. That habit never left. In the years since, I’ve run and maintained my own systems and networks, and it’s what drew me to IT support: I enjoy working out why something isn’t working, not just the theory behind it.
The clearest example is my end-of-year capstone: a complete company network built from the ground up — an Active Directory domain with a redundant second controller, segmented VLANs, an OPNsense firewall with intrusion detection and content filtering, RADIUS-authenticated access and tested backups. Rather than simply follow steps, I built it once and then rebuilt it from scratch on a second platform. Doing it twice is what gave me the confidence that I understood every layer — not only the parts that happened to work the first time.
That same approach — build it, break it, understand it — runs through the rest of my work: a segmented and hardened Linux homelab, a monitoring and ticketing stack (Zabbix, Grafana, osTicket), a self-hosted VoIP lab and a PowerShell toolkit for everyday helpdesk tasks. I turn what I learn into documented, working projects rather than notes I’ll forget. There’s still plenty I want to learn, and that’s the part I enjoy most — I’m at my best when I’m working out why something is broken and putting it right.