About

About me and this blog

Who Am I and What Do I Do?

I’m Liam and I’m a Meteorologist by trade who also loves coding and homelabbing. I have a masters in Meteorology and a PhD where my research focussed on the internal structure and development of thunderstorms. If you are interested you can find my PhD Thesis here titled “Observations and Characteristics of Updraught Structures using High Resolution Radar Observations”.

I’m a Systems Manager and Assistant Weather Forecaster by day, managing multiple servers and developing software for an SME where we produce weather and loss forecasts for the insurance sector. My day involves weather forecasting, managing on-prem and cloud servers, MySQL database management and administration, developing software to obtain and process weather observations and forecasts, API development, on-demand projects from clients, management of customer facing websites/tools and technical support.

By night I like to work on my homelab, my own coding projects and research stocks and the stock market. Python is my language of choice and I have been coding in Python for many years and love working with data. I enjoy running my own Homelab, with the purpose of this site to blog my journey into the homelab rabbit hole. I’ve always had an interest in IT/Tech and run a small homelab and my main focus is to learn new tech/software stacks so that I can improve my skillset.

Why is this blog called totoslab.co.uk?

This blog and some of my homelab is named after our dog Toto. After all he is the one who works the hardest in keeping the homelab running! …and he’s cute

What’s this blog about

I started this site to blog about my homelab, projects and new skills I learn along the way. I’ve read and used many many blogs over the years which have helped me learn new things, get systems/applications setup and helped with bug fixing. So, I thought it would be a good idea for me to start a blog to post about things I’ve learnt and will be learning. This blog will

1. Serve as documentation for me so anything I do can be documented and I don’t have to dig around again to figure out how to do what I already did❗
2. Hopefully help you 🫵 and you’ll find my posts useful.

I hope to be able to provide some useful content for others interested in homelabbing and to journal my progress in learning more about DevOps.

Interests

Some of my interests include

• Homelabbing!
• Coding in Python 🐍
• Learning new tech skills
• Long walks with my wife and our doggy Toto
• Cooking 🍗🧄 with my wife and especially eating 😋
• Researching stocks and following the stock market
• Drinking coffee❗ ☕

Learn more and contribute on GitHub.