About

Hey, I'm Josh — a systems specialist, documentation gremlin, automation enthusiast, and occasional infrastructure goblin wrangler.

I’m more of a jack of all trades than a master of any one thing. I enjoy jumping between different areas of tech, picking up random projects and experiments along the way. These side quests are how I deepen my knowledge, test my understanding, and chase down interesting questions.

I like taking messy workflows, half-documented processes, mystery services, and those classic “why is this broken again?” situations and turning them into something structured, observable, repeatable, and way less cursed.

How I think

I like systems that are:

• Reliable enough to trust
• Observable enough to troubleshoot
• Documented enough to survive future questions
• Simple enough to reason about
• Flexible enough to evolve without turning into a haunted mansion
• Boring enough in production that nobody has to light a candle

I’m not afraid of complexity when it’s earned, but I’m deeply suspicious of unnecessary complexity — especially the kind that shows up wearing an “enterprise-grade” label and demands three dashboards and a blood oath just to restart a service.

What I do

Most of my work sits in the overlap between systems thinking, technical problem-solving, and operational sanity. You’ll usually find me working on:

• Systems & infrastructure — keeping services organized, understandable, and maintainable
• Self-hosting & homelab — running, testing, breaking, fixing, and documenting services on hardware I control
• Automation & tooling — building scripts and small tools that kill repetitive work
• Documentation & process improvement — turning chaotic workflows into something with a spine
• Project planning — turning vague ideas into clear requirements and working tools

I also volunteer on the tech side:

• LearnStrong.net — I’ve been managing the website and publishing content since 2012. It’s an educational resource site by Dr. Tim McGee full of course materials, instructional videos, study guides, ACT prep, and resources for students, families, and educators.

• Chickahominy Wildlife — I helped build and design chickahominywildlife.org from the ground up. They’re a Virginia-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to rescuing, rehabilitating, and releasing injured and orphaned native wildlife.

I enjoy using my skills to support causes I care about.

What I build

This site collects my work across:

• Internal tools and desktop utilities
• Labeling and receipt-design workflows
• Volunteer operations systems
• Media launchers
• Homelab infrastructure
• Reverse proxies, monitoring, and self-hosted services
• Automation and documentation systems

Some projects are polished, some are prototypes, and many start as random experiments just to see what happens. That’s okay — good ideas don’t always arrive fully formed.

Why this site exists

Viles.info is part technical portfolio, part project archive, and part public notebook.

I built it so I can:

• Show the kind of technical problems I enjoy solving
• Document projects as they grow and change
• Keep notes somewhere more permanent than final_final_notes_v3.md
• Give future employers, collaborators, or curious people a real sense of how I think and work
• Share the journey of someone who learns by doing lots of different things

This isn’t a glossy corporate portfolio. It’s a working record of how I build, troubleshoot, organize, and occasionally argue with computers until they make better choices.

The short version

I’m a jack of all trades who builds useful things, documents how they work, and tries to leave systems less chaotic than I found them. I learn best by throwing myself into random projects and experiments — sometimes writing code, sometimes fixing infrastructure, sometimes writing documentation because the old process was clearly assembled during a thunderstorm.

Usually it works out.
Unless YAML is involved. 😄