About

I’m Ben Weaver. I’ve been teaching for a dozen years and currently teach 5th grade science. The tech side started when I got handed a computer science class and had to stay a week ahead of the students, which turned out to be an excellent way to learn something.

Since then it’s mostly been a matter of following whatever I got curious about. I earned my CompTIA A+ and I’m working through Network+ now, with Security+ after it. Plenty of things haven’t stuck. I spent a while on malware analysis and reverse engineering before admitting the math wasn’t there yet, so I backed up and started working through discrete math instead. I’d rather say that plainly than pretend the path was straight.

What has stuck: a homelab built almost entirely from secondhand and e-waste hardware, running the services I’d otherwise be renting from someone else. Segmented networks, my own DNS, my own backups, and a steady supply of self-inflicted problems to fix. Alongside that there’s a lot of soldering, ESP32 boards, and things coming off a 3D printer that mostly cooperates. I care about privacy and civic transparency, and occasionally do something about it locally.

The common thread is that I learn things by building them, and I write down what happened, including the parts that didn’t work, which are usually the more useful half. That’s what this site is for. Most of it ends up in the projects or the blog.