Sacramento-based IT consultant, homelabber, and chronic pattern-finder. I have a hard time looking at any system -- technical or otherwise -- without wanting to understand every layer and how they connect. My GitHub is where I document that process in public.
"Less a git tree, more a manzanita -- sprawls in every direction, thrives where other plants won't. Still branching."
Blog, projects, and the thinking behind the work -- all live at johnmcdougal.com.
- 🏗️ Cue-verse -- A framework for giving your homelab depth and linked memory. Because a lab without context is just a pile of running VMs.
- 📦 Userspace (WIP) -- How do we own our own data and make it interoperable across modern tech -- whether you have one external drive or a full rack? Figuring it out in public.
- 🔐 DevSecOps platform -- Building and releasing sanitized components as I go. Security-first, human-readable.
- Homelab: Proxmox · Docker (moving to Podman!) · Ubuntu Server · Aeon Desktop · Windows Server · Netbird ZTNA
- Tinkering: Arduino · Raspberry Pi · QMK / custom keyboards
- ML node: Dual RTX 3090 · 128GB ECC -- running local models, learning what "agentic" actually means in practice
- Working toward: Self-hosted IDP (Authentik) · observability pipelines · HA at homelab scale
📚 CalBright College | ✅ CompTIA Security+ | 🔄 CySA+ · Net+ in progress
💼 Self-employed IT Consultant | 📍 Sacramento, CA
Experiments. Works in progress. Tools I built because I needed them. Documentation of things I figured out the hard way. I believe the process is worth sharing, not just the result -- and that you can learn something from anyone willing to show their work.