About

🖋️ Who I am

Linux Platform Engineer and Privacy Advocate with roots in science communication. I spent fifteen years as a science journalist and radio/podcast producer before moving permanently into infrastructure. That background still shapes how I document things, explain systems, and think about complexity. I live in Gourock, on the Firth of Clyde in Scotland, since 2023.

🖋️ What I do

Managing hybrid infrastructure that spans legacy systems and modern stacks alike.

My focus areas:

• Linux/Unix systems administration (Rocky Linux, RHEL, Ubuntu, Solaris)
• Virtualisation and containerisation (Proxmox VE, Nutanix AHV, LXC, Docker)
• Object storage and distributed systems (OpenStack Swift)
• Identity and access management (OpenLDAP, LDAP netgroups)
• Web infrastructure (Apache, ModSecurity, reverse proxies, SSL management)
• Infrastructure automation and configuration management (SaltStack, Bash, Python)
• Legacy system operations (Solaris 9, Ingres, JBoss application servers)
• Self-hosted infrastructure and privacy tooling

🖋️ What I learn

• Local LLM inference - running and fine-tuning models (Mixtral, Mistral) on self-hosted bare-metal server via Ollama || RAG systems - building retrieval pipelines to make local LLMs context-aware without sending data to the cloud

The goal is always the same: useful tools that run on hardware you control.

🖋️ Homelab

A self-hosted stack built around privacy-first principles and the conviction that you should own your data and services.

🖋️ Background

• 🇮🇹 Born in Italy, living in Scotland since 2013
• 📻 15 years in science journalism and radio/podcast production
• 📖 Published science fiction and open source history
• 🧅 Tor middle relay operator
• 🌱 SolarPunk addicted - decentralization over convenience, privacy by default
• 🎵 Music obsessive - prog metal, folk metal, jazz
• 🧩 Twisty puzzle collector (20+ puzzles, daily driver: MoYu 3x3x3)
• 🧠 Neurodivergent - wired differently, works as intended