A former hobbyist, accidentally forced into a career.

I started touching servers at fourteen, because the Minecraft community I was in needed someone who wasn't afraid of an SSH prompt. At sixteen, I took over operations at LumenGaming — a Minecraft hosting business that I grew to serve 1,200+ paying customers, peaking at 850 concurrently-hosted servers on an $8,500/mo bare-metal footprint. That job is what turned a side project into a career I never explicitly signed up for.

Since then I've founded and operated three more things — Team Hydra (a software studio that ships for Discord themselves, Gucci, Nickelodeon, PicsArt, Hoyoverse, Scopely, and dozens of other Fortune 500 partners), the Team Hydra XYZ Foundation (a non-profit recycling hardware and teaching free tech classes in Ontario), and most recently Sunrise Unified IT, an MSP currently finishing its launch runway in the Niagara Region.

In my (air-quoted) free time I run a homelab, take photos, play games, manage a non-profit, run multiple businesses, and keep a basement full of servers quiet enough that I can sleep upstairs. Everything I self-host, I try to eventually offer free to other admins and devs, because this hobby is too good to gatekeep.

The servers in the basement earn their keep. They provide free heating through the winter, nearly zeroing out my gas bill. The whole setup runs on solar power, backed by two Tesla Powerwall Gen 3 units that keep things online rain or shine.