Overview

It's been a while since my last post. As I noted in my "About this Blog" page, I've been busy with a full-time job and studying for professional certifications. This hasn't changed, but I'm excited to share some of what I've been working on.

Since my last post, I've been working on a new certification and several home lab projects, all of which, I'm glad to say, have been going well. During this time, I've also gathered material for several blog posts that I plan to publish in the near future, God willing. The overarching theme for me these past few months has certainly been growth and development, so let me break down what I've been up to.

New Certification

I am happy to announce that last month (August 2025), I passed my CompTIA Network+ exam! This brings my total to two CompTIA certifications: A+ and now Network+.

Huge shoutout to Professor Messer's YouTube channel and course materials. They where instrumental in my studies and preparation for the exam. Moreover, the discount on exam vouchers purchased through his site is the icing on the cake. If anyone reading this is working on their certification or thinking about it, feel free to check out his complete video course playlist here and his course materials on his website.

Home Lab

It's been difficult to keep up with my home lab while I was studying—and certainly in the last few weeks leading up to my exam—but I did manage to squeeze it in when I could. I've been working with the Proxmox hypervisor and building out a bunch of self-hosted solutions to learn system administration here at home.

I have several posts planned that will detail these projects, including step-by-step guides on how you can replicate them. For now, here's a sample of what I've been working on: a Photoprism deployment for backing up my personal photos, a Bitwarden deployment for managing credentials, an NGINX reverse proxy hosted on a Rocky 9 VM, and a small UniFi network to connect it all (which I am working on expanding).

I chose these projects for two main reasons: 1) they provide practical solutions to personal needs, and 2) they offer hands-on exposure to common systems and processes found in the professional world. God willing, I'll be able to detail each of them in dedicated posts soon—including one on how this blog is deployed, which was a great project in and of itself!

Blog Updates

You may have noticed that the dates for these blog posts do not display correctly and all say "MONTHS_OF_THE_YEAR..." that's an issue with the theme I've been using for the CMS powering my website (which is awesome by the way check it out here) that I am planning on updating soon to resolve the issue.

Conclusion

I am thrilled to now have a second professional certification and am excited to start gaining more experience and work towards my next one. For now, however, I'm excited to refocus on publishing more posts and continuing to work on my homelab projects to grow my practical skills.

Post Script note about AI Usage in this post

I made use of Google's Gemini AI to proofread and work through the clarity of this blog post; however, the contents contained therein are all my original thoughts.