Beyond the Code

My on-prem cloud started as curiosity about what it would take to run 'real' infrastructure at home. It ended up becoming a 6-node Kubernetes cluster across three Proxmox hypervisors, with Ceph distributed storage, ArgoCD for GitOps deployments, and a full observability stack.

I self-host everything I reasonably can: photo storage (Immich), passwords (Vaultwarden), document storage (Nextcloud), and several personal applications I'm building. All traffic is TLS-terminated, secrets are managed via Infisical and the External Secrets Operator, and I try to treat my home infrastructure with the same discipline I'd apply to a production environment.

The on-prem cloud has been one of the best investments I've made in my own skills. Diagnosing asymmetric routing issues in Ceph, tuning Cilium in native routing mode, and building GitOps pipelines from scratch gives you an intuition that's hard to develop any other way. I write about some of this in the blog.

Table tennis is my favourite sport to play. There's something satisfying about the pace of it — the rapid back and forth, reading your opponent's spin, adjusting your shots in real time. It rewards both technical precision and tactical thinking, which I find genuinely enjoyable.

I play regularly and enjoy both the competitive and social side of the game. If you play and are ever looking for a game in London, feel free to reach out.

Staying active is important to me — it keeps energy levels up, clears the mind, and makes me better at work. I run, go to the gym, and try to keep movement as a regular part of the week rather than something I do occasionally.

Running in particular has a nice meditative quality. A long run is a good time to think through a problem or just step away from screens for an hour.