Hi, I'm Charles Pickering.
I run Makerland — a homelab that quietly insists on being treated like real infrastructure. By day I work on platform infrastructure at PSPRS. By night I write the posts here, mostly so I have someone to rubber-duck with.
The longer story.
Most of what I do today I picked up sideways. I started at Arizona State University as a Lab Aide, calibrating color profiles and running the design school’s 3D printing shop — useful training for IT work, it turns out, since it was mostly equipment maintenance, documentation, and teaching other people how not to break things. I finished a BSD in Industrial Design in 2023 and somehow ended up in technical support instead of a studio.
These days I’m a Systems Network Engineer at the Public Safety Personnel Retirement System (PSPRS), where I’ve been leading the org’s move to the cloud — Terraform and HCP Terraform for infrastructure as code, AWS serverless services like Lambda, API Gateway, CloudFront, and RDS, and Azure for AKS, Communication Services, App Service, networking, and storage, with Azure Monitor tying it together. I also own identity and endpoint management (Entra ID, Active Directory, Intune) and the on-prem estate (VMware, SCVMM/Hyper-V), with Azure DevOps running the pipelines. Before that, I spent a couple of years at ASU doing similar work at a smaller scale — SCVMM, SCCM/MECM, Grafana, and a datacenter network I got to rebuild from the ground up.
Makerland is where the homelab versions of those same problems live — the ones I get to run end-to-end without a change advisory board. I write mostly so I have to explain my decisions out loud, which tends to catch the bad ones before they get expensive.
Off-screen: rock climbing, hiking, and a dog who has strong opinions about how long homelab projects are allowed to take. I’m also an Eagle Scout, and I’m pretty much always picking up some new technology, whether or not it has anything to do with the day job.
The git log.
A reverse-chronological commit history of the career, abbreviated.
Systems Network Engineer
· Public Safety Personnel Retirement System (PSPRS)Leading the organization’s shift to the cloud: Terraform and HCP Terraform for infrastructure as code, AWS serverless (Lambda, API Gateway, CloudFront, RDS), and Azure (AKS, Communication Services, App Service, networking, storage, Monitor). Also own identity (Entra ID, Active Directory, Intune) and the on-prem side of the house (VMware, SCVMM/Hyper-V), with Azure DevOps running the pipelines that tie it together.
Technical Support Engineer
· Arizona State UniversityRearchitected the department’s datacenter network and SCCM/MECM deployment, stood up Grafana Cloud and a highly available SCVMM platform, and ran vulnerability remediation, backups, and disaster recovery for 200+ assets across a hybrid Windows/Linux/Hyper-V environment.
Technical Support Analyst
· Arizona State UniversityManaged endpoint security across Active Directory, SharePoint, and Jamf Pro, deployed Zabbix monitoring, and led a device inventory project that cleaned up patch compliance and surfaced missing hardware.
Lab Aide
· Arizona State UniversityRan the design school’s color management and 3D printing workflows, trained new staff, and kept a fabrication lab’s worth of equipment running.