Missed Part 1? Start here: From Football to Kubernetes: How I Reinvented Myself Through Technology

If you read Part 1, you know football was my first identity. Technology definitely wasn’t. At least not on the surface. But if I’m being honest, the nerd side of me had always been there. It just took me a while to fully let it out.

And believe it or not Ced’s Home Lab didn’t start with expensive servers, enterprise gear, or fancy cloud infrastructure. It started with trash. No seriously. Literal trash.

Ole Miss, Athletics, and Finding Opportunity in Junk

After football, I landed at the University of Mississippi, Ole Miss, where I worked as the head electrician over athletics. Sports still felt familiar. Athletics felt like home.

But something interesting started happening. Without fully realizing it, I was becoming obsessed with technology. When students moved out of dorms at Ole Miss, they threw away everything, old desktops, computer parts, thin clients, electronics, random cables. Sometimes stuff that still worked.

And instead of seeing junk, I saw possibility. So I started collecting it. My wife probably thought I was crazy. Most people see an old computer and think: that thing is trash. I’d see it and think: I wonder what I can turn this into.

Little by little, I started building things. Nothing fancy. Nothing clean. Definitely not Instagram worthy. Honestly, it was mostly chaos. But I was learning. And that mattered.

Raspberry Pis Changed Everything

At some point, I discovered Raspberry Pis. And if you’ve ever gotten into Raspberry Pis, you already know. It starts innocent. Then suddenly you’re ten projects deep wondering how you ended up running servers in your house.

I started using them for random projects, automation, experimentation, networking, learning, breaking things, fixing things, breaking them again, then Googling for three hours trying to figure out why. Early on I was mostly a hardware guy. More RAM. More storage. Faster CPUs. Bigger everything. I was chasing hardware.

But eventually something changed. I stopped asking what are the best specs and started asking how does all of this actually work?

That question changed everything.

Falling Down the Linux Rabbit Hole

I started getting curious. Really curious. How does Linux actually work? How do systems communicate? How does networking work? How does one server know how to find another server? How do systems scale? How does virtualization work? How do containers work? Why does Kubernetes seem impossible until suddenly it starts making sense?

That curiosity turned into obsession. The deeper I went, the more I realized technology isn’t just hardware. It’s systems. Infrastructure. Communication. Architecture. Automation. Problem solving. Everything connects, networking, Linux, cloud, containers, virtualization, observability, automation. It all overlaps. And the more I learned, the more addicted I became.

From Athletics to Robots and High Security Facilities

I eventually moved to Starship Technologies, working with autonomous delivery robots. Yes, real robots rolling around campuses delivering food. Working there gave me even more exposure to systems thinking, robotics, networking, operations, troubleshooting, and technology at scale.

Then COVID hit. Things slowed down. But life opened a new door. I got a call from a company contracted with the Department of Homeland Security. And suddenly life got very different, working on technology used by organizations like CBP, TSA, FBI, and the Secret Service. Airports. Government facilities. High security environments. Places I never imagined I’d be as a kid from Paris, Kentucky.

At one point, I even got to do work at the White House itself. That still feels surreal to say out loud.

The Home Lab Became My Playground

Through all of it, the homelab obsession kept growing. While other people were relaxing, I was learning. Building. Experimenting. Breaking things. Fixing things. Breaking them again. That’s still how I learn today.

  • Linux
  • Kubernetes
  • Proxmox
  • Grafana
  • Prometheus
  • K3s
  • Terraform
  • Docker
  • Networking
  • Observability
  • Automation
  • AI Systems

At some point it stopped being just a hobby and became I genuinely love understanding how systems work. I wanted to know everything, how infrastructure connects, how systems communicate, how applications stay healthy, how automation saves time, how clusters stay resilient.

The Homelab That Helped Me Land GE Aerospace

I genuinely believe my home lab helped me land my role at GE Aerospace. Sure, we talked about experience during the interview. But honestly, we spent a lot of time talking about my homelab. Because your homelab tells a story. It shows curiosity, self learning, problem solving, systems thinking, troubleshooting, discipline and the willingness to fail and keep learning anyway.

To me, Ced’s Home Lab became proof of something bigger. Proof that I had reinvented myself. Again.

Ced’s Home Lab Isn’t Really About Servers

It’s about reinvention. It’s about curiosity. It’s about learning. It’s proof that your first identity doesn’t have to be your final identity. I went from athlete, to feeling completely lost, to rebuilding myself through technology. And I’m still building. Still learning. Still figuring things out.

You’re allowed to reinvent yourself. You’re allowed to start over. And no matter where you start, never stop learning. Because sometimes the thing that changes your life starts with a trash computer someone else gave up on.

Welcome to Ced’s Home Lab. We’re just getting started.