I'm currently a NOC Engineer at NetActuate in Raleigh, NC, where I started in July 2025. I manage and support global infrastructure across 40+ Points of Presence, working with bare metal servers, BGP peering at Internet Exchange points, and utilizing automation tools like Ansible and Puppet.
Before NetActuate, I worked at Segra as a NOC Analyst II and NOC Technician, where I supported transport, IP, and Ethernet networks, performed RFC 2544 tests, and created training documentation. I started my networking career at AT&T in December 2023 as a Network Engineer Tier 1, supporting managed services for government accounts.
I hold multiple networking certifications including CCNA (July 2024), Network+ (Jan 2024), JNCIA (Oct 2024), and FCA (Sep 2024). I'm currently studying for RHCSA certification to expand into Infrastructure Engineering and DevOps roles. I graduated from Riverside High School in Durham, NC in 2019.
The biggest project outside my day job is Piedmont Hosting — a cloud hosting platform I designed, built, and run solo. It sells three products: metered VPS, game server hosting across eight titles, and shared web hosting with email. Every layer is mine: the physical R730 and R320 in a colocation cabinet, the OPNsense-driven network fabric, the KVM/libvirt + cloud-init provisioning pipeline, the Stripe-backed Next.js portal, and the customer-facing REST API.
Building a hosting company end-to-end has been the best forcing function I've ever had. If the firewall templating is wrong, a customer VM is exposed. If the provisioning pipeline stalls, someone paid for something they can't use. If the webhook signature check regresses, orders don't finalize. That pressure has pushed me to care deeply about idempotent flows, full observability via Prometheus/Grafana/Uptime Kuma, and recovery paths for everything — because when you're the only operator, there's no "the other team will catch it."
The platform runs real paying workloads today, including a self-hosted knife-making business (High Heat Forge) and this portfolio site you're reading.
I also build and manage highheatforge.com, a custom Django e-commerce platform from scratch for my dad's bladesmithing and knife-making instruction business in Durham, North Carolina. The project has been my playground for full-stack Python/Django development, PostgreSQL schema design, live Stripe checkout with server-side webhook finalization, atomic inventory, and Calendly-integrated class booking.
It's also been a chance to eat my own dog food: the site lives on Piedmont Hosting's shared web hosting product, sends mail through the Piedmont mailcow, and fronts through the same Cloudflare edge the rest of the platform uses.
What started as a homelab in my closet is now a colocation cabinet with a /27 of public IPv4 delegated to me over BGP. The hardware hasn't changed much — still the Dell PowerEdge R730 (customer workloads) and R320 (infrastructure) combo — but the scope has: OPNsense for routing and NAT, a Juniper EX3400 for L2, and a Cloudflare Tunnel fronting the portal so there are no open inbound ports on the control plane.
On top of that sit Prometheus + Grafana dashboards for every layer, Uptime Kuma both on-site and hosted externally on a BisectHosting VPS (so if the cabinet is down, alerts still fire), and a self-hosted ntfy server pushing to my phone for everything that matters: failed provisioning, stuck services, backup failures, payment webhook errors.
I approach problems systematically, whether I'm troubleshooting packet loss in a transit network or a failing Stripe webhook. I believe in:
I'm driven by the challenge of building systems that just work in production. Whether it's a global tier-1 network, a hosting platform taking real Stripe payments, or an e-commerce site processing real orders, I want to see my systems run smoothly with minimal intervention because they were engineered correctly from the start.
My goal is to transition into Infrastructure Engineering or DevOps roles where I can combine network engineering with systems automation and cloud infrastructure at scale.
Based in Cary/Durham, North Carolina