The Short Version
I started building PCs at 12. Scrounged parts, watched tutorials, figured it out. That first boot — the POST beep, the BIOS screen, the realization that I built this — never went away. It just kept finding new things to build.
That curiosity is the thread through everything. PCs became servers. Servers became a homelab. The homelab became infrastructure for AI systems. 3D printers became tools for fossil hunting fieldwork. Every new skill opened a door to the next thing. I didn't plan a path — I followed what was interesting and it turned out the interesting things connect.
These days I build AI agent systems on hardware I own, mod 3D printers, hunt for fossils, and run a homelab that does everything from local LLM inference to media serving. I'm not a company. I'm not selling anything. I just like understanding how things work from the ground up.
The Longer Version
The thing nobody tells you about building your first PC is that it rewires how you think about everything. Once you realize a computer is just components that snap together according to rules you can learn, you start seeing everything that way. A 3D printer is just motors and a hot end. A server is just a PC that doesn't sleep. An AI agent is just software that follows a pipeline. The complexity is real, but it's not magic. It's learnable.
That's been the driving principle: if I can learn how it works, I can build it. If I can build it, I own it. If I own it, I can make it do exactly what I need instead of settling for what someone else decided I should have.
I'm not a professional developer or a trained engineer. I'm someone who learns by building, breaks things regularly, and treats every failure as a lesson about what to try next. The homelab has been rebuilt more times than I can count. OpenClaw is on its sixth major version. The 3D printers have been modified so heavily that the original manufacturer wouldn't recognize them. That's the process. Build, break, learn, rebuild better.
The Timeline
Age 12
First Gaming PC Build
Saved up, bought parts, built a gaming PC from scratch. Didn't know what half the components did when I ordered them. Learned by doing — and by the panic of realizing the motherboard standoffs were missing. That feeling of "I built this and it actually works" never went away. This was the moment everything clicked — the realization that you don't have to accept things as they come. You can build them yourself. Every project since traces back to this one.
2013
First 3D Printer
First of ~35 printers. Immediately started modifying it — stock settings were a starting point, not a destination. Upgraded hotends, custom bed surfaces, firmware tweaks. Learned Fusion 360 for custom part design because the things needed didn't exist yet. Started designing and printing tools for fossil hunting fieldwork — custom specimen holders, field equipment, preparation tools, storage solutions. The printer stopped being a novelty and became a workshop tool that made other hobbies possible.
Late 2010s
Custom PC Builds & the Homelab
Gaming rigs evolved into workstations. Started helping friends and family build theirs too — became the person people called when they wanted a PC that wasn't a Dell. Every build taught something new: thermal design, cable management, component selection, the tradeoffs between performance and budget. Started buying used server hardware because the price-to-performance ratio was absurd compared to consumer parts. This is where the homelab started taking shape — a repurposed workstation running a few services turned into a dedicated server running a hypervisor.
2020
GPU Flipping & the Homelab Gets Serious
GPU flipping era — sourcing broken graphics cards from eBay, diagnosing PCB and VRAM failures, reflowing solder, replacing VRAM chips, reselling refurbished. Learned GPU architecture from the inside out. At the same time, the homelab got serious: Proxmox hypervisor, KVM virtualization, GPU passthrough for compute workloads. Learned the full infrastructure stack the hard way: networking (VLANs, DNS, firewall rules), storage (ZFS, SSD tiering, backup strategies), virtualization (PCI passthrough, IOMMU groups, resource allocation), and containerization (LXC, Docker). Started self-hosting everything — media, DNS, monitoring, file sync. When something broke at 2am, I fixed it. That's how you actually learn infrastructure.
2024
AI Becomes the Focus
The server started as a repurposed Dell T430 workstation tower with a modified Tesla P40 (24GB) and an RTX 3060 12GB — enterprise inference grunt plus consumer GPU headroom. That hardware combination was the foundation for local AI inference before the current system existed. ROCm, local models, building actual agents rather than API wrappers. First iterations of OpenClaw. Each version taught what the previous one got wrong. By the end of the year, the architecture questions were more interesting than the model selection questions — that's when it clicked.
2025–2026
Aegis Falls & ACT-R
The full system takes shape.
Aegis Falls is the name for the complete architecture: frontier intelligence from Claude cascading down into local execution through Lily. OpenClaw reaches v6.
ACT-R cognitive memory layer gives the AI persistent, activation-weighted memory that decays naturally and strengthens with use. Lily becomes a continuously-running assistant with accumulated experience — not a chatbot that resets every session, but a persistent intelligence that learns from every interaction. The platform doesn't just execute tasks anymore. It learns from them.
Philosophy
Build it yourself. Own your stack. Run it local.
If you're not willing to run it locally, you don't own it.
I don't trust black boxes. If I'm going to rely on a tool, I want to understand how it works, be able to fix it when it breaks, and own the data it produces. That's why I run local AI inference instead of depending entirely on cloud APIs. That's why I self-host services instead of using SaaS. That's why I build my own printers and computers instead of buying pre-built.
This isn't about being anti-cloud or anti-commercial. I use Claude API calls when local models can't handle the reasoning. I buy components from manufacturers. It's about having the knowledge and infrastructure to be self-sufficient when it matters — and understanding the tradeoffs you're making when you outsource.
The cloud is a tool, not a foundation. When the cloud goes down, my systems keep running. When an API changes its pricing, my costs don't change. When a service decides to deprecate something I depend on, my stack keeps working. Self-sufficiency isn't paranoia. It's engineering.
Everything on this site is something I actually use. No demo projects. No proof-of-concepts gathering dust. If it's here, it runs.
Fossil Hunting
This isn't a tech thing, but it's a real passion and it connects to everything else in a way that matters.
I hunt fossils. Ordovician mostly — Cincinnati is one of the best places in the world for it. The Ohio River Valley is loaded with 450-million-year-old marine fossils: trilobites, brachiopods, bryozoans, crinoids. You walk along creek beds and road cuts and they're just there, weathering out of the limestone.
The 3D printing connects directly — I design and print custom specimen holders, field tools, preparation equipment, and storage solutions. Fusion 360 lets me design a holder that fits a specific specimen perfectly. The printer makes it real in a few hours. That loop from "I need a thing" to "I made the thing" is the same loop that drives everything else I build.
Fossil hunting teaches patience and observation. You learn to see patterns in rock that other people walk past. You learn that the interesting stuff is usually where nobody else is looking. That mindset transfers directly to debugging, to architecture, to building systems that work. Pay attention. Look closely. The answers are in the details.