About

I'm Jeremy Champion — sysadmin and network engineer in Bozeman, Montana, thirty-some years into a career that's never had a clean job title.

My first computer was an Epson Equity 1, pulled out of the garbage when I was nine. No hard drive, just two 5.25" floppy drives. You booted the OS off one disk, put your application disk in the other, and ran your program from there. So the first thing I ever learned about a computer was that the order of operations is not optional.

Around then my mom took a job at a small software company, and I became the kid who wouldn't leave — asking the programmers what they were building and the sysadmins why the server did that. I started out labeling disks and assembling binder manuals. By high school I was writing code for them. I shipped my first real software at 16: a registry viewer for the support team, because we were living in DLL hell and the reps needed to see what was actually on a customer's machine. Then I went to college, fell into a job, and never went back. Everything since has been self-taught.

I've been at my current place more than twenty years. Started on help desk. My boss noticed I could program, and for the next decade I wrote the software behind a truss production facility. Along the way I rebuilt every server, replaced the network, became the AD admin, and became the SQL DBA — mostly because the developer background made me the closest thing available. I'm the IT manager now, and there are still things to fix.

Twenty years in one place leaves you with opinions. Systems should run lean; extra fluff is future maintenance you agreed to without reading it. Security is a design input, not a phase near the end. And I need to understand why something works before I'll run it.

Then I hit a plateau. The mountains are why I moved here, and for a stretch of years the outdoors got most of what I had and the technical side got the rest. April 2026 broke that. I'd used AI lightly before, mostly as a joke — it wrote scripts I had to fix, and I still felt like I wrote better code. Then I had a small idea, a central web page to manage a handful of Raspberry Pis, and handed it to an agent. It understood the problem. The code compiled and ran on the first try. Second, maybe.

The debugging and research I used to spend whole nights on could suddenly happen at the speed I think. And I'm a dad now — I don't get whole nights. That math had been keeping me from starting things at all.

So this site is what comes off the bench: notes on whatever I'm taking apart, references I got tired of rediscovering, and writeups of what I build.

I spent thirty years reading other people's posts at 2am. My turn to write some down.