I spent seven years as a tattoo artist — building a small business, developing an eye for precision, and quietly learning every system that touched the operation. The IT work was always more interesting.
DNS, networking, Linux administration, and infrastructure got their hooks in me early. Now that's where I work full-time. I run Arch Linux as my daily driver, maintain a home lab I actually use, and approach systems the way I approached tattooing: with patience, documentation, and a low tolerance for guesswork.
I recently built and deployed a full self-hosted infrastructure stack for my business — booking, CRM, workflow automation, consent form collection — all running in production on a VPS I manage. That stack is documented below.