# 👋 Hi there — I’m @thesabear

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I’m a curious, self-taught technologist who runs a real, multi-host homelab as a production-grade playground: a Proxmox hypervisor cluster hosting a fleet of VMs/LXCs, a two-zone Caddy reverse-proxy design fronted by Authentik SSO, self-hosted Gitea with Ansible-driven scheduled maintenance, and Terraform+Packer provisioning for bootstrapping new hosts from hardened, minimal images. What started as a hobby project has grown into a full-on journey into DevOps, automation, infrastructure, and security.

My long-term goal is to build a career in IT — specifically in environments where learning never stops and innovation is part of the culture.

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## 👀 What I’m Exploring
I use my homelab as a real-world playground to deepen my understanding of core IT concepts. Some of the areas I’m actively exploring include:

- Infrastructure-as-Code: provisioning and hardening hosts from scratch with Terraform + Packer + Ansible
- Reverse-proxy architecture and identity: a dual-zone Caddy setup (internal service-to-service vs. user-facing) fronted by Authentik forward-auth
- Workflow automation: Ansible for scheduled fleet maintenance, Kestra and n8n for everything else
- Monitoring, observability, and resilient service design

Each project teaches me something new, and everything I learn pushes me further toward becoming a well-rounded IT/DevOps engineer.

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## 🌱 What I’m Learning Right Now
I’m currently focused on:

- Refining the Ansible roles and playbooks that keep the fleet patched and consistent
- Tightening the Caddy/Authentik reverse-proxy and SSO design as new services get added
- Running my own self-hosted Gitea instead of relying on external platforms
- Improving scripting skills — Python and Bash are next on my list

I enjoy understanding not just how something works, but how to automate it, secure it, and integrate it cleanly into a larger system.

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## ⚡ Fun Fact
I’m entirely self-taught. Every tool, trick, concept, and workflow in my repos is something I learned by doing — from reading docs to breaking my lab at 2 a.m. and fixing it again.

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## 📁 What You’ll Find in This Repository
This repo is a sanitized mirror of the homelab I actually run day to day, organized by where each piece lives:

- `rocky-docker-lxc/` — the main application host: ~35 Docker Compose stacks (media, productivity, dev tools, databases)
- `caddy-vm/` — the user-facing reverse proxy (Caddy + mTLS + Authentik forward-auth) and Hawser, its Dockhand connector agent
- `monitoring-vm/` — Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki
- `automation/` — the automation VM, which runs three separate repos side by side: `ansible/` (scheduled fleet maintenance), `automation-vm/` (Gitea, Kestra, n8n, NetBox, Node-RED, MQTT), and `iac/` (Terraform + Packer + provisioning Ansible)
- `Proxmox/` — cheat-sheets and notes on the underlying hypervisor cluster

Real IPs, ports, credentials, and internal PKI details are stripped throughout — the goal is to show the actual architecture and how the pieces tie together, not to hand out a working blueprint of my network.

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### 🚀 Let’s Connect

[![LinkedIn](https://img.shields.io/badge/LinkedIn-blue?style=for-the-badge&logo=linkedin&logoColor=white)](https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-surgey)
[![X](https://img.shields.io/badge/X-black?style=for-the-badge&logo=x&logoColor=white)](https://x.com/nomadianation)
[![Instagram](https://img.shields.io/badge/Instagram-E4405F?style=for-the-badge&logo=instagram&logoColor=white)](https://www.instagram.com/nomadianation)
[![TikTok](https://img.shields.io/badge/TikTok-black?style=for-the-badge&logo=tiktok&logoColor=white)](https://www.tiktok.com/@nomadianation)
[![YouTube](https://img.shields.io/badge/YouTube-red?style=for-the-badge&logo=youtube&logoColor=white)](https://www.youtube.com/@nomadianation)
[![Website](https://img.shields.io/badge/Website-blueviolet?style=for-the-badge&logo=google-chrome&logoColor=white)](https://nomadianation.thesabear.net/)


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