About Me

Hey, I'm Matthew 👋

I'm a 27-year-old Army E5 currently stationed in Hawaii. When I'm not doing Army things, I'm probably breaking something in my homelab, learning to code, or convincing myself that "this time" the Docker container will work on the first try.

My journey into tech started simply: I wanted to stream my own movies without paying for a dozen subscriptions. That led to Jellyfin. Jellyfin led to the *arr stack. The *arr stack led to TrueNAS SCALE. And now I have nearly 30 containers running, a custom AI monitoring system, and a Telegram bot that tells me when things break (which is often).

I'm currently learning web development because I want to build my own apps. Not because I think I'll be good at it immediately, but because I've learned that the best way to learn anything is to just start and figure it out along the way. Hence the name: ProbablyNotADev.

Other Interests

When I'm not staring at a terminal, you might find me:

• Flying FPV drones and doing cinematography
• 3D printing on my Neptune 4 Pro
• Reading science fiction (just finished Project Hail Mary - amazing)
• Working on my memoir, "Chasing Shadows"
• Playing way too many car mechanic simulation games
• Making music in a Zach Bryan style

The Homelab Stack

Here's what's currently running in my setup:

Why This Blog?

I started this blog for a few reasons:

1. Documentation. I've solved the same problems multiple times because I forgot how I fixed them. Writing it down helps me and hopefully helps you too.

2. Learning in public. There's something about explaining things that makes you understand them better. Plus, being wrong publicly is a great motivator to actually research things properly.

3. Building something. This blog itself is a project. I built it from scratch to learn web development. No templates, no WordPress, just code and caffeine.