RUSTYT ROOSER
Opening the village gates...
I look after the parts of IT most people would rather not think about — the network, the servers, the boxes in the rack, the devices that are supposed to talk to each other and don't. I build the integration that makes them work, and I write the documentation so the next person isn't stuck.
What I actually do, in plain terms.
I'm Rustyt Rooser, an IT engineer who works across the whole stack of a small-to-mid business setup: the network it runs on, the servers under it, the devices attached to it, and the software that ties them together. I'm equally comfortable configuring BGP, rebuilding a Proxmox host, reverse-engineering an undocumented vendor API, or writing the web front end someone will actually look at.
Most problems live in the gaps between systems, not inside them. Being across networking, servers, embedded devices and code means I can follow a fault all the way through instead of handing it to someone else at the boundary.
Vendors rarely make their kit talk to anything else. I've built bridges to APIs with no documentation, signed request schemes, and hardware that only speaks its own protocol — so the data ends up where you need it.
Anything I build gets documented, version-controlled and made restartable. You should never be locked into me — the point is a system your team can run without a phone call.
Ranked by how often people ask for it.
Routing and switching, VLAN and subnet design, firewalls, VPN and remote access, BGP, DNS, and tracking down the latency nobody can explain. Wired, wireless and the bit in between.
Proxmox, LXC and VMs, Linux administration, Docker, backups that are actually tested, monitoring and alerting so you hear about a failure from a notification rather than a customer.
Home Assistant, MQTT, ESPHome, Zigbee and Matter. Lighting, climate, cameras, access and energy pulled into one system with automations that hold up when the internet doesn't.
Getting two systems that were never meant to meet to exchange data reliably — including vendor portals with no public API, where the integration has to be worked out from the wire and then kept stable.
Inverter and meter data collected, normalised and graphed properly — production, consumption and per-device breakdowns, with history you own rather than history that lives on someone else's portal.
Fast, responsive sites and dashboards, plus real-time 3D in the browser with three.js — floor plans, product views and control surfaces that run on a phone without a plugin.
Things I use often enough to be quick with
Tell me what's broken, or what you'd like built.