I am changing careers into IT support, building hands-on skills through home lab work, documentation, and scripting. This site is my working portfolio. Currently looking for IT support work in the Rapid City / Black Hills area.
A business laptop provisioned the way a client device would be: Autopilot device preparation with device association, Entra join, Intune, BitLocker, Windows LAPS and a standard-user daily account.
A three-node Proxmox VE cluster built from mixed used hardware to run always-on household services and host a disposable Windows Server lab, with verified backups and a documented rebuild procedure.
A file-based knowledge vault, read and written directly by Claude, built to carry context between six previously isolated Claude Projects. The architecture, the migration, three failure modes, and the checks run against it.
Day-to-day administration of a live hybrid Microsoft 365 tenant across Exchange Online, Defender, SharePoint and Purview. Nine root-cause findings, three of them cases where a system reported success while doing nothing useful.
Bare-metal build of a small-business hybrid identity environment, executed twice to measure process improvement. Round 2: 5 hours 58 minutes, single operator, no rework.
Evan Ireland
Home Sweet Home
Former Army officer with a logistics background, now moving into IT full time.
I like anything that widens the skill set - home lab builds, going deeper into the Microsoft ecosystem (Entra, Intune, Autopilot), working with Linux distros (Arch btw), and picking up scripting as I go along.
This site is the living version of that. Project write-ups with lessons learned, documentation so it works better next time, and building my own personal repository of information.
Currently looking for IT support work in the Rapid City / Black Hills area.
Setting up a business laptop the way I would for a client with Autopilot, Intune and Entra join, and what the laptop itself turned out to be hiding.
Three staged modules and a year-old wording bug went into the manual at once, because I decided against a version-bump chain that would leave v1.4 stale the day it shipped. What got added, what got corrected, and the placement call I made against my own source material's advice.
Three used office PCs, one new build, and two days where DNS did not work. Building a Proxmox cluster from scratch, including the parts I got wrong.
How six Claude Projects that couldn't see each other turned into one folder Claude can read directly, why that finally makes 'second brain' mean something, and three mistakes I only found by running the system cold.
