👋 Hi, I’m Chuck. I'm known as @chuckmilam here and on most other platforms.

Linux admin since the mid‑90s — back when installing Slackware meant feeding a stack of floppies into a machine like you were performing some kind of ritual sacrifice. A year or two later I even contributed a fix to the Red Hat Linux network drivers for a specific Compaq server. They added me to the Red Hat IPO contributor list, which was very cool…

…but I was a broke college kid, so buying in wasn’t happening. Great story, terrible timing.

These days I’m deep into automation and platform‑level infrastructure work, plus the occasional home lab experiment that somehow turns into a real tool.

I like systems that are predictable, repeatable, and don’t require tribal knowledge or heroic effort to operate.

🔥 Currently tinkering with:

• A refreshed version of create-ks-iso
• Pulp vs Nexus for “I have too many artifacts and not enough budget” scenarios
• Velero backup workflows and Kubernetes disaster‑recovery experiments
• Tailscale mesh networking for the lake house + home lab
• Hosting and benchmarking local AI models
• Ham radio projects — mostly reminding myself that perfection is optional, and sometimes a random wire tossed into a tree works the world if the propagation gods are feeling generous

🧰 My toolbox:

Ansible, Docker/Podman, Terraform, RHEL/Fedora, Tailscale, Bash, Python, CI/CD pipelines, AI tooling where appropriate, and — when the situation calls for it — DeWalt power tools and Kubota machinery. Some issues require more torque than Git can provide.

💥 War Stories

• Installed Slackware from a stack of floppies that looked like a Jenga tower. If one went bad, you started over. Character‑building stuff.
• Learned the hard way that “we’ll fix it later” is the most dangerous sentence in infrastructure.
• Built an asset‑tracking system with a SQL backend and discovered, with the quiet certainty of a historian uncovering an inconvenient archive, that many items were not where they were believed to be. The database simply presented the facts. Reactions varied.
• Took on a stalled centralized logging project just before COVID and found myself rediscovering Linux, discovering Ansible, and realizing the work was quietly pointing me toward a different path. In reviving the system, I understood I needed to revive my own trajectory.
• Spent years showing that Linux could be deployed in a fully STIG‑compliant fashion. It required a working knowledge of the systems, their integration, and a degree of persistence that, in hindsight, bordered on stubbornness — some might say borderline obsession.

🟩 About the green squares

• My public contribution graph is calm and orderly.
• My private and corporate repos look like someone spilled green paint on the calendar. I can’t show those, but there are something like 900+ commits over there in the last year.

🧠 What I believe

• Infrastructure should be reproducible, documented in code, and boring in the best possible way.
• If it can be automated, it will be.
• If you’re afraid it might break, it’s already broken. That’s just tech debt talking.