Hello, World
Hello! My name is Robert Clabough, and welcome to my newly-minted blog.
I've never been one to write, or to put myself out there online either, but in an effort to push myself out of my comfort zone, here I am.
Today, I want to share a bit about myself and what you can expect from this blog. (tldr – a lot of very nerdy things)
I'm a software engineer in the Seattle/Bellevue area, and I've been living here about 8 years now. I've been told I have a more unique experience then others when it comes to working tech, and from what my peers have told me, others may be interested in hearing my experiences as well. I don't want to go too deep into my work history, I'm sure you don't want to read a resume today, but I will give some quick background on me, my work, and what I do for fun today.
I started off first interning for the State of Iowa many years ago, and learned some great skills there. However my career really started with Robert Half consulting, and I contracted for about 7 solid years at the beginning of my career. I'm going to do a whole post at some point about contracting (consulting, as they like to call it), but ultimately I had a very positive experience. It taught me how to be quick and agile, how to be dropped into a project that's halfway over and start producing work within not weeks, not days, but hours. I appreciate the time I put in there and the people who helped me succeed. (There's 2 at Robert Half I know helped me more in my career than they realize)
Robert Half was a very unique journey, bouncing between 4 person startups out of a garage to working for large enterprises like Expedia. One month I was running games at a Google conference in London, and the next I was the lead engineer for an education startup. I learned how different companies use code in very different ways, from social media to fintech to pure behind the scenes infrastructure. I'm proud of the vastly different experiences that I've had, and I believe that it's allowed me to see tech from a difference lens compared to many engineers.
This blog won't only be about work, however, in fact even more it may be about my silly side projects.
I have a few hobbies, the topmost is what is known as “Homelabbing” or “self-hosting” – running services in your home. Hosting your own Netflix, hosting your own email, recipes, chat, video, video game streaming, you name it, I've probably tried it. Essentially if it has a monthly subscription fee – I probably host it myself.
This is something I've always been a fan of. Even as a teenager I was hosting Windows XP: Media Center Edition. It was a bit different back then, but anyone else remember those precious few years when Microsoft gave you a legitimate 10 foot interface, you could buy a remote from Logitech, and watch all of your .wmv files right on your TV? I went to Best Buy, bought an ATI card with S-Video, and hooked it right up to my 24” CRT TV, and was it cool. Blurry, 120x240 episodes of South Park that I could play whenever I wanted.
Since then my presence has grown in the homelab space then. I'm not running a pentium 3 with the S-Video gpu anymore unfortunately, but I think it's still sitting somewhere in my garage. Now I'm told I run things more extravagantly than the average homelabber.
My current setup is a full kubernetes cluster, running about 150 pods at any given time. I run on my own hardware, with about 5 primary compute nodes, a data server, several switches, and a very patient wife. After all, as the saying goes
Why pay monthly compute costs to AWS when I could instead spend 10 times that amount on hardware?
Lately I've been toying with AI, running compute pods with GPUs attached to them, running LLMs, Image Generation, Voice simulation, and more. All things I look forward to writing blog posts about, but I've been successfully able to build my own little selfhosted ChatGPT, I have a Firefox extension that calls my own GPT to do things like summarizing pages, I am working on a shell extension for Gnome that can interact directly with it, and a very fun one – every morning I have EDI, the ship's computer from Mass Effect, read out out my agenda for the day.
That's really what I hope this blog will be about, showing what I'm tinkering with, what I'm trying to get running. I think it's a ton of fun, seeing some new technology big tech is running with and excited about, and trying to get it to run on my bundle of spare parts I have in the back closet.
My next few blogs are already thought out, but maybe there will be a new project that grabs my eye in the meantime. I don't expect everyone to find interest here, but if you're interested how I run kubernetes at home, how I monitor the services, how I provide alternatives to iCloud/OneDrive to my family, and more, then I hope you will find interest in this. I hope to provide insight to my thinking process, how I troubleshoot issues that come up, and as we go I'll make sure to provide tricks that I've found to be helpful.
If you're on the Fediverse, then my blog is subscribe-able! You can subscribe at @robert@blog.clabough.tech from any service that you prefer. If you're not on the Fediverse, here's a quick video explaining what it is and I will probably have a blog post diving more in depth as well, as this is now my 3rd fediverse service that I'm hosting.
Thank you for stopping by! I'm excited to share my experiences and path through not only homelabbing and hobbies, but also my career and software engineering as a whole.