Infrastructure Engineer

I came from restaurant kitchens. Seven years of nights, weekends, and double shifts — the kind of work where you learn endurance before you learn anything else. When COVID hit, I lost my job overnight.

I took whatever work I could find. I moved into food manufacturing — production lines, heat, heavy lifting, long shifts managing teams. Over time my back, knees, and wrists started breaking down. I was spending money I didn't have on physio just to stay functional enough to show up the next day. I had a daughter to raise. No safety net. No fallback.

I drove Uber on weekends until a dangerous incident forced me to stop. I spent two years studying Forex — building scripts, backtesting strategies, learning risk management. The markets taught me pattern recognition and discipline. The losses taught me something more valuable: humility, and the real cost of shortcuts.

Then I invested in a blockchain project that turned out to be a scam. It hurt financially. But it introduced me to something that changed everything — infrastructure.

A community member helped me run my first Linux node. I had never touched Linux before. I didn't know Docker, networking, automation, or system administration. But something clicked.

I rebuilt nodes from scratch. I debugged failures at midnight after factory shifts. I learned Docker, container isolation, monitoring pipelines, backup strategies, and recovery workflows. I went from asking questions to answering them. Within the community I became the person people came to when their nodes broke. Even after the project collapsed and the scam was exposed — I didn't stop.

Working in kitchens taught me to perform under pressure without losing precision. Factory floors taught me resilience and consistency. Forex taught me to read patterns and manage risk. Fatherhood taught me to think in decades, not weeks. Loss taught me to question every assumption. Those lessons show up in every system I build.

My path wasn't linear. It wasn't clean. There were years where survival took priority over ambition. But every setback sharpened something. Every late night debugging alone built something that a classroom never could. Every system I had to fix under pressure — with no mentor, no team, no safety net — that's the engineer I became.