I build things to understand how they work, then write down what broke.
Currently moving into IT infrastructure and support. Everything below is work I did myself, documented well enough that you can check it.
Labs · Seven hands-on infrastructure labs in Microsoft Azure
An Active Directory domain with 10,000 scripted user accounts and a Group Policy lockout policy. A help desk built from an empty VM up through IIS, PHP and MySQL, with tickets triaged to closure. Packet captures across ICMP, SSH, DHCP, DNS and RDP, with a firewall rule written and proven to work. DNS caching demonstrated rather than described.
Every lab includes a troubleshooting section covering what actually went wrong, because that is the part that transfers.
| Project | What it is | Built with |
|---|---|---|
| ATHENS | Local-first macOS document library. Imports documents into a sandboxed vault, extracts searchable text, and answers questions across the archive with on-device retrieval. Nothing leaves the Mac. | SwiftUI, SwiftData, Vision, PDFKit, llama.cpp |
| PULDAR | Offline-first iOS budgeting app. Turns plain-English entries like "spent 45 at whole foods" into structured transactions, and scans receipts with on-device OCR. No backend, no cloud parsing. | SwiftUI, SwiftData, CloudKit, VisionKit, WidgetKit |
| PRAXIS | iOS behaviour engine that turns real-world execution into RPG progression. Quests track themselves through HealthKit and location, and bosses take damage from actual metrics like savings, sleep and body composition. | SwiftUI, HealthKit, CoreLocation, CloudKit, WidgetKit, watchOS |
ATHENS is the one I would point at if you want to see how I handle a problem with real constraints. Running language models on a laptop means budgeting threads against performance cores, releasing multi-gigabyte memory under pressure, and cleaning up child processes that macOS will not kill for you. Those are not tutorial problems.
Infrastructure · Azure (virtual machines, virtual networks, network security groups, storage, resource groups), Windows Server 2022, Active Directory Domain Services, Group Policy, DNS, SMB and NTFS permissions
Networking · TCP/IP, DHCP, DNS, SSH, RDP, ICMP, VPN, packet analysis in Wireshark
Scripting · PowerShell, Python
Support · osTicket, ticket triage and escalation, SLA design, account lockouts and password resets, Event Viewer and log review
Development · Swift, SwiftUI, SwiftData, local LLM inference
Testing · Selenium WebDriver, Behave, Gherkin, Allure, BrowserStack
I would rather verify something than assume it. In the labs that means pinging the host before joining the domain, checking gpresult before claiming a policy applied, and testing a share with a second account rather than the one already in hand.
When something breaks I write down what the error actually said, what I thought it meant, and what it turned out to be. Three of those are in the Active Directory lab. They are the most useful pages in the repo.
Los Angeles, CA · marcus@marcusshaw.com · marcshaw.co