Joey Horne

I resolve the support cases that have already stalled, and I run the projects that keep a support and implementation team on schedule.

I work for a company that builds billing, customer, and operations software for utility cooperatives. Over [N] years there I have moved from front line support through systems administration and reporting into project management. The technical work has not stopped; I am still the escalation point for server, database, and deployment problems, and I train the engineers who handle the front line.

Outside work I run a self hosted server environment at home. It is described below because it is where most of my Linux, container, and automation experience comes from.

• Escalated support. Cases that have passed through front line and second tier without resolution: Windows Server configuration, Oracle database connectivity, application deployment failures, and customer reports that produce wrong numbers. I find the root cause, fix it, and document it so the case does not come back.
• Project management. Since 2026, delivery timelines and escalations for a team of support and implementation engineers, including hand offs to and from the development group and regular status reporting to leadership.
• Customer infrastructure. Direct work with customers' IT departments on their application servers, database drivers, user access, and security reviews, including declining requests that would weaken their environment.
• Disaster recovery. Wrote and maintain the team's standard DR configuration checklist after the same class of failure recurred across several customer restores.
• Internal tooling. Built an internal web portal that gives each support engineer a prioritized daily work list assembled from the team's ticketing, monitoring, telephony, and CRM systems. In daily use by the team.
• Training. Onboard and coach support engineers on the product's server side, database access, and troubleshooting method.
• Reporting. SQL reports against billing and customer data, including reconciliation work during platform migrations.

A permanent, always on server environment across several Linux hosts, one Windows host, and a GPU machine, running roughly forty containerized services. I administer it the way I would a small company's infrastructure.

• Access and identity. All public services sit behind a single reverse proxy with automatic TLS certificates and single sign on. Service credentials are kept in a secrets vault and fetched at runtime.
• Operations. Uptime monitoring, host and container metrics, alerting, and nightly backups to local and offsite storage. The backups have been used for a real restore after a disk was wiped.
• Services I run. A personal wiki; a search index over my own documents and notes; a service that records, transcribes, and summarizes my meetings and makes them searchable; a bookmark archive; a task board; a photo library with image recognition search; and a media library with automated acquisition and transcoding.
• Home automation. Climate, lighting, and presence detection, with a wall mounted status dashboard I built myself.
• AI. Local language model inference on the GPU host, and a set of scheduled assistants that check system health, verify backups, and keep the documentation current. They run with restricted permissions and their work is reviewed.
• Software. An Android client for my own services, a plugin repository for an online game (GitHub), and the usual collection of maintenance scripts.

Windows Server and client administration. Ubuntu Linux. Hyper-V. Active Directory. Docker and Docker Compose. PowerShell daily; Bash and Python as needed. Oracle over ODBC, SQL. Reverse proxies, TLS, DNS, single sign on. Backup and restore procedures. Jira, Confluence, ClickUp. Practical use of large language models for operations and reporting, including local inference and retrieval over internal documentation.