About

What I do

By day I run Windows endpoint and identity infrastructure for a semiconductor equipment manufacturer with offices in Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Mexico, and India. That means Intune and Entra ID at the center, Windows Autopilot for zero-touch provisioning, Conditional Access and DLP policy for the parts that matter, and a steady amount of PowerShell and Microsoft Graph automation holding the seams together.

The through-line in my work is removing repetitive human steps. I cut new-laptop provisioning from about five hours to fifteen minutes with Autopilot and department-scoped Intune configs. I replaced an org-wide remote-support tool that let people ride shared credentials with a self-hosted Apache Guacamole deployment where every session is tied to a company login and logged. Account synchronization between cloud and on-premise directories that used to eat roughly fifteen hours a week now runs itself.

How I got here

Five-plus years in IT, earned from the bottom up. I started as a field technician in Las Vegas pulling Cat5e and Cat6, installing demarc points, and keeping point-of-sale hardware alive across retail sites. From 2022 to 2025 I ran Ramdel IT Services, my own consulting company in the SF Bay Area, leading network refreshes across more than fifty Grocery Outlet locations and deploying enterprise gear — Cisco Catalyst 9000s, Fortinet, Juniper, SonicWall — for clients including JP Morgan Chase and Marin Housing Authority. I hired and trained junior techs to scale delivery while still handling Tier 1 and Tier 2 support for key accounts myself.

I joined Mattson Technology as a Desktop Support Technician in November 2024 and was promoted to System Administrator eight months later, after holding ten-to-fifteen-minute resolution times on 100+ tickets a month and running a 100-device hardware refresh. I hold CompTIA A+ and the Google IT Support Professional certificate.

The lab this site runs on

This domain is not on a hosting plan. It runs from an enterprise-grade home data center: a Proxmox hypervisor running Ubuntu and Windows VMs, a 10 GbE backbone with TrueNAS and ZFS storage, and a micro-segmented VLAN architecture on Unifi that keeps IoT devices, cameras, and servers off each other's networks. Twingate provides zero-trust administrative access, Cloudflare fronts six-plus self-hosted production web applications with verified SSL, and everything replicates offsite to Backblaze on a schedule.

The lab doubles as an R&D sandbox. I prototype open-source tooling here and promote what survives into production at work — that is how a self-hosted Wiki.js instance ended up replacing a licensed wiki SaaS subscription.

Other work

Outside infrastructure, I host and maintain sites for a handful of projects: El Ruben's Tamales, my family's business, on a Dockerized WordPress stack; Depth of Field Studio, a photography learning site; and Chip Stack, a poker companion app. I also produce music and shoot photography under separate handles, which live on the night side of this site.