I'm Robert — online as merox: me from Melcher, ro from Robert, x from an old alias where 0x39 is hex for 57, my birthday. HPC Sysadmin by day, homelab engineer by night.

Background

It started in 2006 — I was nine — with a Pentium 4 running Windows XP that I kept breaking, and a family friend who'd come reinstall it. I watched closely enough to eventually do it myself, then never stopped pulling things apart to understand them.

By 2010 I was running private game servers — Metin2, CS 1.6, SA:MP — with a phpBB community built around them. That's where I first got serious about infrastructure: chasing uptime, understanding failure modes, keeping things running for people who depended on them.

Career

• 2018 — First sysadmin role at Netex. A close friend dragged me out of bed to write my CV, in Notepad, printed just in case. I had the logic, not the vocabulary. It worked. Full story →
• 2020 — CCNA to fill the networking gaps I knew I had, which opened the door into cybersecurity.
• Now — HPC Sysadmin at Forvia, managing high-performance compute infrastructure for automotive R&D.

Homelab

I run a public homelab with Kubernetes and GitOps as a proving ground for whatever I'm currently learning. This blog is the notebook I keep along the way — practical guides, post-mortems, and things I wish someone had written down before I had to figure them out.

Outside work

Usually on the bike — a CUBE Reaction SLX, every ride logged on Strava. Rock and folk when the playlist gets to choose.