I'm a one-person IT department. The servers, the network, the helpdesk, the occasional 2 a.m. "why is nothing working" — that's all me.
And the moment a task starts repeating itself, I write something to handle it so I don't have to. That habit is how I ended up half sysadmin, half developer.
Four years in. Still like the job.
Four years ago I walked into a company with no IT department. There's still no IT department — there's me. The network, the servers, the phones, the 54 people who need their machines to work: all of it lands on my desk.
Which turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. When you're the only one, you don't get to specialise. I designed the network from scratch, stood up the servers, and when the business needed software that didn't exist, I built that too — three internal apps that people now use every single day.
I hold two CCNAs, and I think the most useful person in IT is the one who understands both the wire and the code — and can move between them without needing to call someone else.
Every one of these runs in production. Some of them run while I sleep.
An automated outbound calling system for the call centre — it handles call flows, routes conversations, and tracks what each agent is doing. It replaced hours of manual dialling and logging every single day.
No existing infrastructure, no template to copy. I specced it, cabled it, and configured it: pfSense firewall, managed switch, VLANs to keep traffic sane, and VPN access so people could work from anywhere.
We were drowning in spreadsheets, so I built us out of them: client management, task pipelines, team organisation and internal reporting, all shaped around how we actually work. The management team basically lives in it now.
Sales that update in real time — no refreshing, no reloading, just numbers moving as they happen. The whole operations team had adopted it within two weeks.
Everything internal runs here: an Ubuntu Server environment with Docker containers and VMs hosting our apps, services and scheduled jobs. I built it, and I'm the one who keeps it healthy.
It wakes up every morning, scrapes fresh listings off LinkedIn, Indeed and a few others, asks Claude to score how well each one fits my CV, writes a tailored cover letter, and quietly emails the application off — logging everything so I know exactly what went where.
User provisioning, log cleanup, disk checks, nightly health-report emails — all on a schedule, all hands-off. It quietly took about 40% of the repetitive sysadmin grind off my plate.
The entire IT department is me. I designed the network from scratch — pfSense firewall, VLANs, VPN — stood up an Ubuntu server running Docker and VMs, built three internal web apps, and wrote the automation that keeps it all ticking over. Day to day: 100+ workstations, 54+ people, and the call centre's VoIP. I like the ownership.
My first real IT role — around 30 users across a school and a hotel. Hardware, Active Directory, permissions and shared drives, mixed Windows/Linux troubleshooting, plenty of "have you tried turning it off and on again." It's also where I first scripted my way out of a boring repetitive task. No going back after that.
TCP/IP, DNS/DHCP, VPNs, VLANs, LAN/WAN, pfSense, VoIP/SIP, SSH/RDP — and a lot of patient troubleshooting.
Ubuntu Server, Windows Server, Active Directory, Exchange, SQL Server, Docker, VMs, managed switches.
Python and Bash for most things, PowerShell on Windows, cron and task scheduling to make it run on its own.
PHP & Laravel, MySQL, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, AJAX/JSON, REST APIs — then Git and Docker to ship it.
Firewall config, backups and disaster recovery, user provisioning, hardware repair, ticketing and documentation.
Autonomous by necessity, calm under pressure, and allergic to doing the same manual task twice.
On-site or remote, IT support, systems or automation. Email's the quickest way to me and I actually read it.