About me - DevOps & Software Engineer

My interest in DevOps kicked off at DockerCon 2019, where I got a glimpse of what containers could do. That spark pushed me to explore both frontend and backend roles, and I quickly fell in love with automation, infrastructure, and streamlined workflows. Over the past 5 years, I've been building and shipping software for startups, combining these passions to deliver impactful solutions.

One of my favorite experiences was collaborating with data scientists at Tellus to speed up our entire development-to-production process. Seeing ideas go live faster (and with fewer headaches) fueled my obsession with making life easier for everyone involved. Later at Dosu, I dug deeper into agent-driven systems, data pipelines, and developer tooling—basically anything that helps teams build and ship faster.

I'm currently exploring new opportunities in DevOps and would love to connect. Feel free to reach out!

About this site

This site employs a hybrid SSG+SSR approach, combining Astro's Static Site Generation (SSG) for fast, globally distributed static content with Server-Side Rendering (SSR) powered by Node.js, running on my homelab k3s cluster. Built with Astro, React, Node.js, and TypeScript, the site is built and pushed to my Harbor registry in the cluster using GitHub Actions. FluxCD monitors changes on my source repository (bennettdixon/managed-k3s-homelab)and deploys updates to the cluster automatically.

A public proxy is set up with Nginx and Tailscale on a lightweight AWS Lightsail instance, provisioned using Terraform. This TLS proxy securely routes public traffic to services within my Tailscale network (tailnet) without exposing the rest of the network or cluster. For high availability (HA), alternative methods should be considered. This site does not use a CDN to serve static content yet, it is on the roadmap to improve the performance with edge caching.

About my homelab

I built my homelab to learn more about DevOps, infrastructure, and systems administration on bare-metal. I've been running a homelab since 2024, and it's been a fun and rewarding experience. Most of it, with the exception of the network stack, is run utilizing Proxmox as a hypervisor. I have not yet configured my Proxmox stack to be deployed by Terraform, but that is on the todo list. I utilize mostly used enterprise hardware, with a few exceptions in networking. Checkout my full list below: