IT engineer, managed services
I'm Josh, an engineer at a managed service provider that supports dozens of customers, most of them in biotech and life sciences. I design network topologies, connect sites to AWS, and manage Microsoft 365 and Entra environments. I also build Claude skills that take the paperwork out of the job.
I'm Josh, an IT engineer at a managed service provider that supports dozens of customers, most of them in biotech and life sciences. My days run from designing network topologies and bringing up VPNs into AWS to managing Microsoft 365 and Entra tenants and scoping API permissions for app registrations.
I like the work that sits between systems: the tunnel that has to come up on a new circuit, the sensor that needs to see the right traffic, the audit log a customer has to keep for ten years. When a task keeps repeating, I build a tool for it. That's how I ended up writing Claude skills that draft my change tickets and build my timecard.
Outside work I run a homelab, experiment with email for my family, and build small tools for a volunteer media team. I hold CCNA, CMNA, Azure Fundamentals, and AWS Cloud Practitioner, and I'm studying for CCNP ENCOR and Claude Architect Professional.
Topology design, switching and routing, firewalls, site-to-site VPNs, and the monitoring that tells you when something drifts.
AWS connectivity and workloads, from VPN and BGP design to virtual desktop migration proposals.
Tenant administration, Entra, enterprise applications, and app registrations with tightly scoped API permissions.
Claude skills I built to take the repetitive paperwork out of change tickets and timesheets.
Client details are anonymized. Each project is a real engagement, summarized without names.
Customers needed private connectivity into AWS: one ahead of an internet provider change, one so monitoring tools in AWS could reach a remote site, and one for a new tunnel to a partner.
Prestaged the AWS side of a tunnel before a provider cutover, built a BGP tunnel from a virtual private gateway to a firewall, and brought up an IKEv2 tunnel on an AWS-hosted firewall, then repeated it on the disaster recovery unit.
A managed detection service needed visibility into the traffic crossing a customer's core network.
Deployed a sensor fed by SPAN port mirroring on a stacked core switch pair, and did the same at a second site behind a firewall with managed switches.
A customer's firewalls, a mix of standalone units and one HA pair, needed to move to a newer major release.
Planned the upgrade for every unit, handled the HA pair as a rolling upgrade, and wrote each step up in a change ticket with a backout plan.
A corporate SSID used a shared pre-shared key, so corporate and personal devices sat on the same network.
Scoped a move to RADIUS-backed authentication so corporate devices and everything else land in separate segments.
Clock skew on a customer firewall contributed to a VPN authentication problem, and monitoring had no view of NTP sync.
Wrote a custom monitoring module that reports NTP sync status on the customer's firewalls, so drift raises an alert early.
Customers needed audit records kept long term and, in one case, custodian data collected for a legal vendor.
Configured ten-year audit log retention for a biotech tenant, and separately ran a Purview eDiscovery custodian collection and export.
A small team ran simulation software on dedicated cloud servers and signed in with a shared admin account, on machines that hold regulated data.
Scoping a migration to managed cloud desktops joined to the customer's existing directory so everyone signs in individually, with a second vendor's option weighed as the alternative.
A security team wanted Mac endpoint telemetry, including admin-elevation events, visible to their managed detection provider.
Weighed object-storage forwarding with a cross-account role against syslog and API options, and planned a weekly report built from the raw logs, with storage forwarding as the fallback.
I use Claude as a working partner for the repetitive and the complicated parts of managed services. Anything that touches a customer environment still gets checked by me first.
I built Claude skills that draft change tickets in the Standard and Normal formats my team uses, and a skill that builds my weekly timecard, so the paperwork starts as a draft to review instead of a blank form.
I work through VPN bring-ups, cloud templates, and migration proposals with Claude, then verify each step against vendor documentation and my own testing.
Claude Certified Architect, Foundations is done and the Professional level is in progress. An AWS AI certification is on my list next.
Away from client work I use Claude Code to build complete projects, which is where I've learned what it does well. I steer the design, review what it writes, and keep tests and releases in the loop. The projects themselves are in Home projects.
A live tabletop map I built with it has automated tests that run on every change, weekly dependency updates, automatic data snapshots and numbered releases. Claude helped me design the privacy side too: hidden areas are masked on the server, so players never receive what they shouldn't see.
A video pipeline that picks the wallpaper for my TV uses scene detection and a small image model that runs locally. It has storage limits, health checks and alerts, and has been built to run for months without attention.
I had Claude build a background-music feature for that pipeline, then took it out entirely once we confirmed the plugin it feeds can't play audio across clip changes. The project notes record why, so the gap is a decision and not an oversight.
I described a role-playing game that mixes a daily action budget with side-scrolling dungeon fights. Working from my design, Claude built the overworld, quests, a day system, a boss with a telegraphed move set, upgrades and saving, and I keep the roadmap and decide what comes next.
Personal projects I build at home, outside client work, for fun, for my family, and for a volunteer team.
A Proxmox host carries my virtual machines and containers, Home Assistant and Nextcloud among them. An OPNsense router handles the network and a WireGuard VPN. The NAS is a mergerfs pool protected by SnapRAID that holds media, documents, and my Proxmox backups. I'm planning to grow it with 12 TB drives in RAID 1 and weighing how much to move offsite. All of it is documented in an Obsidian vault, and next I'm writing notes on what runs on each guest.
I'm weighing a self-hosted mail server against Google Workspace, Zoho, and Microsoft for my family on a custom domain, partly as a learning project, with Entra ID single sign-on for homelab apps on the wish list. On the hardware side, a small-form-factor PC is getting an AMD RX 570, which means shuffling power supplies between two machines.
I built a self-hosted hex map for tabletop campaigns with Claude Code. Everyone at the table sees the same map update live while the game master controls what players can see, and hidden areas are masked on the server so players never receive the data underneath. It has terrain, roads and rivers, private notes, invite links for each player, and undo and redo. It runs in a container on my own hardware, with automatic snapshots, tests that run on every change, and versioned releases.
The living-room TV plays short, silent aerial clips that change with the time of day and the season. A pipeline I built with Claude Code watches video channels I choose, cuts new footage into clips with scene detection, and tags each one using brightness analysis and a small image model that runs locally, so nothing leaves my network. I approve clips in a review gallery, and a small service decides what plays now. It runs as a set of containers with storage limits, health checks and alerts, so it can go months without attention.
I'm building a 2D role-playing game in Godot with Claude Code. You explore a top-down world, talk to characters and take on quests, and every day you get a limited number of actions to spend on relationships or training. Dungeon doors switch the game to a side-scrolling brawler with easy enemies and a boss fight that plays more like a fighting game, with a telegraphed move set and tougher behavior. Experience points buy upgrades for both halves, and the plan is to let players assign unlocked moves to their own combo slots. The core loop works end to end today, including saving and loading.
I build small tools for a volunteer media team. One is a bot that watches a Google Drive folder, finds the sermon in a long recording by telling music from speech, and proposes cut points for approval. Another turns documents into slides. I'm also setting up ProPresenter asset sync through a Google Shared Drive and costing out a move from my own server to Azure on nonprofit credits.
Contact
Happy to talk networks, AWS, Microsoft 365, or how I use AI in operations.
hello [at] gwynne [dot] dev