Project History
A running list of things I'm building, have built, or am actively maintaining.
Enrolling and securing a macOS device with Intune: from zero to full Defender for Endpoint
Setting up a brand-new macOS tenant in Intune from scratch — user-driven Company Portal enrollment, mapping an existing Windows policy baseline onto macOS equivalents, and a full 15-step Microsoft Defender for Endpoint deployment via Business Premium.
Going fully passwordless on a Microsoft 365 tenant: email, then straight to passkey
Configuring a solo-admin Business Premium tenant so sign-in is genuinely passwordless — enter an email address and go straight to Windows Hello or a passkey, no password field at all, with a break-glass account and Conditional Access enforcement behind it.
Building Layer 8: from nothing to a self-hosted blog with live security monitoring
The full story of how I built this site — from the initial decision to self-host, through designing the UI, configuring the infrastructure, hardening the security, and watching real attacks get blocked within an hour of going live.
A proper 3-2-1 backup strategy across the whole homelab
Tying TrueNAS, Synology, and my Microsoft 365 tenant together into a genuine 3-2-1 backup strategy — using SharePoint as the offsite copy, with versioning and retention already built in.
Monitoring the whole homelab with Uptime Kuma
A self-hosted status dashboard watching every service across the homelab — Proxmox, the blog, storage, and everything in between — with alerts the moment anything goes down.
Secure remote access to the homelab with Tailscale
Setting up Tailscale for zero-config, encrypted remote access to every device in my homelab — without opening a single additional port on the firewall.
Building a high-performance TrueNAS storage tier with Optane L2ARC
A 10GbE ZFS storage build using a striped pool of NVMe drives with an Optane L2ARC cache, hitting over 1.2GB/s sequential read to a gaming PC over iSCSI.
Zero-touch device provisioning with Entra ID, Intune, and Autopilot
Setting up Windows Autopilot for zero-touch deployment — a device ships to an end user, they sign in, and it configures itself automatically without ever touching IT hands-on.
Building a dual-pane file copy tool in Python with Robocopy under the hood
A desktop app for copying files and folders between locations — dual-pane UI, Robocopy-backed multithreaded transfers, size verification, and packaged as a standalone Windows executable.
Setting up a DMZ VLAN with UniFi for public-facing services
How I isolated my self-hosted blog from the rest of my home network using a dedicated VLAN and UniFi firewall rules — so a compromised server can't reach anything else.
Getting started with pfSense: my home firewall setup
How I set up pfSense as my home firewall — VLANs, firewall rules, DNS over TLS, and why I landed on it over other options.
Running Windows Server in my home lab: AD, DNS, and Group Policy
Setting up a Windows Server VM in Proxmox for Active Directory, DNS, and Group Policy — and why it's worth having even in a home lab.
Setting up iSCSI on TrueNAS for my Steam library
How I configured a TrueNAS iSCSI target over a dedicated 10GbE connection and presented it to my gaming PC as a local disk for Steam — with jumbo frames and write caching tuned for game workloads.
Synology setup: shares, Docker, and keeping it off the open internet
How I set up my Synology NAS for file shares, running Docker containers, and locking it down so it's accessible from my network without being exposed to the internet.