Practical infrastructure skills, taught by someone who ships them.
The shortest path from what you are learning at home to the job you actually want. Written by a cloud architect with 20 years in production and a rack of mini PCs under the desk.
No filler, no affiliate bait, no tutorials written by people who don’t run what they teach.
Start with a series
Six structured paths, each a complete arc from first command to working system. Pick the one that matches where you are, not where the industry says you should be.
Linux Fundamentals
The command-line skills interviews actually test: navigation, permissions, networking, processes and scripting.
Open the series → CH.02Homelab Guides
Build the skills that get you hired on hardware that suits your budget. Pi builds, Proxmox clusters, Docker stacks.
Open the series → CH.03Digital Sovereignty
Own your email, files and services. Self-hosting and cloud skills are not opposites; one sharpens the other.
Open the series → CH.04Automation Fundamentals
Bash, PowerShell, Ansible and Terraform: the step up from manual admin to engineering.
Open the series → CH.05Windows Fundamentals
Active Directory, PowerShell and Group Policy: the Microsoft estate skills most UK IT jobs quietly assume.
Open the series → CH.06Vibe to Production
Take an AI-generated app from “works on my machine” to a production-ready, self-hosted deployment.
Open the series →Fresh from the lab
The six most recent write-ups, straight off the bench. New guides land twice a week.
- I Deployed a Self-Hosted RMM, Decided It Was Limited, and Was Completely Wrong
- NetLock RMM: Overview and Deployment with Docker
- Your Ticket Volume Is a Defect List, Not Demand
- The Permissions Work to Do Before You Deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot
- Least Privilege in Practice: Standing Access, Scope and Just-in-Time
- Joiners, Movers and Leavers: Why Movers Break Your Permission Model
Or go straight to a topic
Everything on the site, grouped the way you would actually look for it.
Written by Eric Lonsdale
A UK-based cloud and infrastructure architect: 20 years in enterprise IT, Azure and self-hosted infrastructure, currently running 30+ services in production on the rack under the desk. Everything on this site comes from running it, not reading about it.
Latest video
Tutorials and build logs on YouTube, for the parts that are easier to show than to write.
Your lab. Your rules.
Don’t wait for the job. Build the skill. Show the work. That’s the whole thing.