Practical guides for system administrators, DevOps engineers, and anyone keeping infrastructure running. Written by a sysadmin who’s been woken up at 3 AM one too many times.
These aren’t rewritten docs or regurgitated tutorials. Every guide is based on real problems I’ve solved in production — the kind that don’t show up in the documentation but show up in your monitoring alerts at 2 AM on a Sunday.
I’ve been doing this for 15 years — from being the only IT person at a small company to managing infrastructure that needs to stay up when half the team is on vacation. The guides here reflect what I’ve learned the hard way: that monitoring is useless if you don’t know what to alert on, that backups are worthless if you’ve never restored one, and that the best automation is the kind that saves you from a 3 AM page, not the kind that looks impressive on your resume.
Who these guides are for
- Junior sysadmins building their skills and home labs
- Solo IT people who need things that work without a team to fall back on
- DevOps engineers who came from the developer side and need the ops perspective
- Small team leads implementing professional practices without enterprise budgets
- Homelabbers who want to learn by breaking things in a safe environment
If you’ve ever been paged at 3 AM and thought “I should have set up better monitoring,” you’re in the right place.
What you’ll find here
- Operations — Monitoring that works, backup audits, server health checks, log analysis
- Automation — Stop doing things manually. Scripts, tools, and workflows that save hours
- Infrastructure — Home labs, Kubernetes without jargon, cloud cost management
- Security — Zero trust for small teams, network hardening
- Career — Documentation habits, common mistakes, myths that need to die
Guides by topic
Monitoring & observability:
- Why Your Monitoring Is Broken (And How to Fix It Before Your Boss Notices) — Most monitoring is alert noise. Here’s how to fix it
- The 5-Minute Server Health Check That Could Save Your Career — A daily ritual that catches 80% of problems before they become emergencies
- The Art of Reading Logs Like a Detective — Find the real cause, not just the symptom
Backups & disaster recovery:
- The Friday Backup Audit: Because Hope Is Not a Strategy — If you haven’t restored it, you don’t have a backup
Automation & scripting:
- Stop Doing Things Manually: 5 Scripts That’ll Make You Look Like a Genius — Real scripts for real problems
- AI for IT Troubleshooting 2026 — Practical use cases for AI in daily sysadmin work
- Tech Survival Guide: AI Edition 2026 — From panic mode to automation master
Infrastructure & cloud:
- Setting Up a Home Lab: A Beginner’s Guide — Hardware, software, and step-by-step setup
- How to Reduce Your Cloud Spend Before Year-End — Saved $2,400/month with these strategies
- Kubernetes Without Jargon: Pods = Processes, Services = Stable Names — The explainer that actually makes sense
Linux & low-level:
- Building Your Own Linux from Scratch (Part 1) — Compile a minimal Linux system in a container
- Compile a Custom Linux Kernel and Add systemd (Part 2) — Kernel compilation + systemd init system
- Your OS Has Been Hiding Things From You — What Windows and Linux don’t tell you
Security & career:
- Zero Trust for Small Teams: Practical Steps — Zero trust without the enterprise price tag
- Sysadmin Myths Busted 2026 — Common beliefs that are wrong
- The Mistakes I Made: Domain Renewal and Other Crimes Against IT — Learn from my failures
- Documentation I Wish I’d Written — After 3 years as the sole IT person
Free tools
- 5 Free Bash Scripts for Sysadmins — SSL checker, log searcher, SSH auditor, disk quota checker, safe service restart
- The 5-Minute Server Health Check Toolkit — The complete automation of the daily ritual above ($9)
About these guides
No sponsored content, no vendor pitches. If I recommend a tool, it’s because I use it on my own systems. The gear page has the full list of hardware and software I actually use daily.
Some links earn a small commission through Newegg, Rakuten Advertising, NordVPN, or NordPass — at no extra cost to you. These help cover the ~€100/year hosting cost. The full disclosure is on the Resources page.
Stay updated
I publish new guides every couple of weeks. The quickest way to follow along is the weekly newsletter — one practical sysadmin tip every Tuesday, no spam. Or grab the free bash scripts pack if you want something you can use immediately.