I build the infrastructure other things run on top of — game servers, storage systems, and the automation that keeps both from quietly falling over. Most projects start as a personal itch: a Minecraft server that needed backups it couldn't afford to lose, a file drive I wanted to run on my own hardware instead of trusting to someone else's dashboard. I spend as much time in Linux, networking, and container setups as I do writing application code, and I generally default to self-hosting something before I default to paying for it.