Portfolio Details

I like to work on projects in my spare time that put me in positions to learn new concepts in networking, software developing, and API integrations in a way that my my wife and I can enjoy.

Home Lab Network Stack

In an effort to put my self in situations to learn more about networking I have set up a home lab to serve as a sandbox environment for me to practice with. Right now I have all of my web traffic on my domain routed through Cloudflare to provide a layer of obscurity, Web Access Firewall, data analytics, SSL Certificate management, etc. This traffic is sent to my home network over DDNS where I have a web server that sits in my DMZ to serve my projects. It is important to note that this web server only has a handful of hand picked ports open that only accept traffic from specific Cloudflare server IP addresses. This is so that all traffic is filtered through Cloudflare over HTTPS. 

Proxmox

Proxmox is an opensource virtualization solution that I use at home to get the most out of my computer hardware resources. This has been a great tool that I have loved working with. It has become the backbone of my home lab as I use it for all my VM's and Containers.

Open Web UI

I am currently using Open AI's GPT API for projects at home, and while doing this I have set up my own instance of Open Web UI to serve as a user interface to this API for my wife and I to use.

Synology NAS

At the moment I run Synology as a NAS server at the house. I chose this because of its user friendly apps my wife and I can use on our phones and computers to share files and photos. This service is not hosted publicly, it currently is only accessible through VPN. I have set up OpenVPN on our phones and computers so that we can connect to this service whenever we want.

SearXNG (In Progress)

This is a project I am currently working on. My goal is to set up a a custom Meta Search Engine that I can host at home that provides a little more security and customizability, but for the most part because this seems like a really fun project. So far I have set up my own instance of SearXNG that seems to accomplish a lot of the things I'm looking for, but I am not crazy about the user interface. I am about to begin creating my own search engine user interface and I am thinking about using SearXNG's API or another like it to handle search requests.