Automation

Field Service Engineer Working as a Field Service Engineer at Quad Plus has put me right on the front lines of heavy industrial automation across the country. Traveling from our Joliet base to manufacturing facilities, steel mills, paper plants, and recycling centers throughout the U.S., I specialize in turnkey commissioning, modernization retrofits, and emergency troubleshooting of mission-critical control and drive systems. In heavy manufacturing, every hour of downtime carries massive operational costs. My role is to step into dynamic, high-stakes plant environments, quickly diagnose complex root causes—whether that is an obscure thyristor firing fault on a high-tonnage DC shredder drive, an optical signal budget drop on a PROFIBUS ring, or a ladder logic race condition in a high-speed slitting line—and engineer lasting, robust solutions. From multi-vendor drive coordination to legacy backplane migrations (bringing discontinued Allen-Bradley SLC 500 or Siemens S5 systems into modern architectures), it’s the ultimate test of hands-on electrical engineering, networking, and control software. ...

Site Reliability Engineer My internship at Nord Security was a game-changer. I got to work on their massive global infrastructure - we’re talking over 5,000 servers worldwide! As part of the SRE team, I spent my days building Django web apps for their production and QA environments, keeping critical services running smoothly, and wrestling with Docker containers until they behaved. The highlight was definitely automating all the repetitive server tasks with Bash scripts and building out solid backup systems for their SQL databases. It was stressful at times (infrastructure at this scale is no joke), but incredibly rewarding to see everything running like clockwork. This experience really opened my eyes to how enterprise-level DevOps actually works in the real world. ...

Electrical Engineer Working at H.B. Taylor Co. was where I really dove into the world of industrial automation. I spent most of my time programming Automation Direct PLC controllers - those things are fascinating because they’re basically tiny computers that control massive manufacturing machines. I’d write the logic that tells conveyor belts when to start/stop, monitors sensors, and basically automates all the repetitive stuff that used to require someone standing there pushing buttons all day. ...

Freelance Developer & Systems Administrator Being self-employed as a developer and sysadmin has been a wild ride. I’ve taught myself everything through trial and error, late nights debugging, and plenty of “what the heck is going on here” moments. My home server setup is basically my digital playground - running on Arch Linux with some Ubuntu bits, it’s hosting Minecraft servers that people play on from all over the world, plus a bunch of other services I’ve tinkered with. ...

Last updated: August 2025 When I first started hosting Minecraft at home, I wanted three things: performance that felt local, the convenience of one‑click updates, and zero exposure of my home IP. This post walks through how I pieced that together—Docker for isolation, Discord bots for control, and a WireGuard+VPS hop so the world never sees where I live. Any infrastructure details below (like ports/domains) are examples, not my actual values. ...