About Me

Despite currently working in software, I've held many odd-jobs and been exposed to a wide variety of both people and perspectives. All the while, amassing more hobbies than any one person can reasonably keep up with.

Truthfully, I've been tapped out on "tech" itself lately as recent buzz seems increasingly dominated by a small number of loud companies/people, hyper-focused on "disrupting" for financial gain, rather than actually innovating or investing in non-flashy, but proven solutions.

That said, I still do find joy in local hacker meetups and talking shop with other computer nerds out in the wild.

Embracing Mediocrity

Some of my current interests working to deplete my ever-shrinking free time supply include: making synthesizer music, crafting stained glass panels, taking photos, riding my fixed-gear bike, skateboarding, attending local shows (music), riding trains all around the world, and otherwise trying to expose myself to as many new experiences as possible.

While I used to let society's mantra of "jack of all trades, master of none" get to me, I've come to realize that the only person I need to impress is myself. I have plenty of fun being mediocre at a large variety of things and to me, that's what matters.

Are things really only worth doing if you're the best at them?

Tech Background (Lack Thereof)

My formal tech education wasn't great, but I've gotten good at self-learning, especially if the skill empowers me to solve current problems in my life. Once I discovered how accessible programming had become during college, I rushed to change my major despite being in my third-year, and against my advisor's strongest recommendations.

I started out taking jobs with low/no pay, hours away from my then-home, and worked with people so much smarter than me, annoyingly trying to learn as much as I could. They gave me jobs that I had no business doing, under immense pressure, and I was grateful for it.

In hindsight, it's clear that this single period of my life was where I learned the most in this field, more than school and certainly any "big" job I had thereafter.

Since then, I've worked as a network and software engineer for the nation's largest ISP, a sysadmin in a blended environment with linux, windows, AND macos employees (nightmare fuel), a database admin for a company who built their own data center, an ops engineer on larger-than-life call center PBX systems, you name it.

I was vastly unqualified for all of these jobs when I started, and felt no more qualified after it was all said and done.

Nobody knows anything before they learn it.

Boj4ck's Beginnings

I started my self-hosting journey with my childhood friend, we sourced second-hand parts from old jobs, university scrap, and recycling centers, eventually building up a basic NAS with shucked EasyStore drives, and focused on archiving our personally owned media collections. We were ripping old favorite CDs, VHS skate videos, Hi8 and MiniDV home movies, DVD box sets, and cell phone photos, all to be preserved "forever". Everyone's lost a lot of data at least once, right?

We iterated through many different storage layouts, system architectures, hardware configurations, and operating systems, having fun and pulling our hair-out in equal measure.

While a lot of boj4ck has changed since those early days, and he's since moved on to pursue other passions, I like to think that the core vision that we set out to accomplish back then is still something I'm striving to realize today, no matter the odds.