About
I'm JD. I started out in Germany as a Linux consultant and trainer, travelled to Hong Kong, the US and India for customers and industry events, and have spent about half my career in the Philippines, these days in Central Visayas.
I'm President and Technical Director of ProNetivity Inc., a local think tank that takes on complex problems for customers of every size, and also works as a managed service provider and ISP. I'm also Technical Director at Immerse Networks Limited, incorporated in Hong Kong in 2016 and run remotely ever since. It serves international clients, works closely with equipment and prototyping manufacturers, and builds its own hardware for a range of uses. EXODUS is the software that runs on it.
This site is the part that's just me. What I enjoy most is finding out why something is broken and fixing it properly. Lately that includes getting language models to do real work on hardware you own. I run that kind of setup in our own operations and in my own lab, and it's where a good share of my spare time and money goes.
Most of the problems I get called for have been worked around for years. They usually come down to one or two decisions nobody wrote down.
same guy, different hatOn stage and on paper
- Most of my teaching is for enterprise and service provider teams, as talks and hands-on training
- University visits around the country, and on-the-job trainees inside my own companies
- Resource speaker at PhNOG in Cebu, and at the odd free-software meetup
- LPIC-1, LPIC-2, and SUSE certified as Linux administrator and engineer
- German and English natively, enough Visaya to get by
Where the hours went
- Linux, BSD and systemsDebian, RHEL and Rocky, SUSE, FreeBSD, Proxmox, KVM, Cloudron, high availability, monitoring
- NetworksCampus and data centre networks, MikroTik, Juniper, Arista, VyOS, BGP, MPLS, WireGuard
- Internet exchangesIXP Manager, BIRD, route servers, VXLAN fabrics
- Fibre and cablingDark fibre, GPON, DWDM, splicing, structured cabling, telecom grounding
- AutomationAnsible, Rundeck, containers, Kubernetes
- Source control and deliveryForgejo, Git, CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, package builds
- AI and agent harnessesClaude Code, Pi, LiteLLM, LLM routers, hedr, Devbox, Rakazo, Paperclip, OpenCyber, local inference
- DNS, email and identityDNSSEC, DMARC, Postfix, LDAP, FreeIPA, Keycloak
My longest-standing strategic partners are RISE and GetaFIX, followed by Fil Products Group and its many operators across the Visayas and Mindanao. Other carriers and operators I've worked with include PLDT, Globe, Converge, DITO, Infinivan and KCAT.
What I push for
- IPv6, deployed properly and not left as an afterthought
- Peering at local internet exchanges, so local traffic stays local. I still help networks get peered at GetaFIX.
- Independence from the frontier AI providers: run your own models and keep ownership of your data
- Open source software, self-hosted or on-premises, so your data and your tools stay yours
Away from clients
- Father
- Self-defence advocate
- Electronics
- Meshtastic
- Robotics
- Prototyping
- Industrial 3D printing
- Home lab
- Local AI models