Robert Melcher
Online as merox: me from Melcher,
ro from Robert, x from an old alias where
0x39 is hex for 57, my birthday.
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 2011 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 — I had the logic, not the vocabulary. Full story →
- 2020 CCNA, to close the networking gaps I knew I had. It opened the door into security.
- Now HPC sysadmin at Forvia: 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.