> USER_PROFILE

// INITIALIZATION

Connection established. Welcome to Yodds.

This site is my personal domain to showcase projects, host tutorials, and upload the occasional music track I've created. I’ve been navigating the web since the early days of 56k dial-up modems, Windows XP, MSN Messenger, and this site’s CyberPunk Terminal Theme is a homage to that era of the internet.

Regarding the name: "Yodds". It's an alias generated by random chance. Selecting 5 random numbers between 1 and 26, then mapping each number to its position in the alphabet. After some letter arranging, the name Yodds was created. Try out the name generator here: [ MakeName v7.6 ]

// SYSTEM_RESOURCES

Professionally, I'm an Infrastructure and Security specialist working in high-availability, secure environments. I bridge the gap between legacy hardware and modern automation.

*I also run a dedicated Home Lab featuring a Proxmox cluster, TrueNAS storage, and various RaspberryPis for backup, automation, security and privacy.

// ORIGIN_STORY

My journey started in secondary school with a drag-and-drop site builder by a company called Homestead. It was a golden age of forums and community help. When Homestead pulled the rug on their free tier, it forced me to adapt.

That limitation sparked a need to learn the underlying mechanics: FTP, HTML. I also tried to learn Perl but then later found PHP was a lot easier to develop with. I would browse ebay for old Proliant servers to use at home and host my LAMP stack, my mother was thrilled with the power bill and noise of the servers in the house! That curiosity however, snowballed into a thriving career in IT infrastructure. I still approach problems with that same mindset: how does this work, why did it work?

// RUNTIME_ENVIRONMENT

> Audio_Output

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and in lockdown, my wife bought me a basic DJ controller to mix music. As I was learning, I wanted to create loops to use during transistion of tracks, this then moved into FL Studio. I entered a whole new realm of things to learn and music production can be very technical in itself! To improve my music production, I set myself a "52-week challenge" to finish one track a week. I'm no Avicii, but the improvement from Week 1 to Week 52 is massive.

> Roaming_Profile

When I'm not attached to a keyboard and the weather is great, I'm usually towing a caravan. Whilst living in South Belgium, I took the family on a little tour of europe. We pitched up in the Netherlands, Luxembourg and France. Now we are back in the UK, I'll start ticking off the best spots in Wales, the Peak District, and the Scottish Highlands.