network + AI engineer · maker · artist
ColtonSpahmer
Over a decade keeping carrier networks up, and the rest of my time building the systems that run on them — then printing the parts, scoring the soundtrack, and painting the walls. Six disciplines, one workshop.
01
Engineering
Over a decade keeping carrier networks alive, and everything I've built on top of them since — agents, fleets, and the machines they run on.
Carrier and enterprise networks
Network Engineering
Cisco IOS, BGP, OSPF, and carrier Ethernet — the layer everything else on this page runs on top of.
Multi-vendor integration
Carrier Ethernet & WAN
Outage response
B.S. in Information Security and Forensics, Rochester Institute of Technology — High Honors. Full history in theresume.
Agents, fleets, and pipelines
AI Systems
Systems that do real operational work — not demos. These run on hardware in my house, every day.
Mission Control
Every homelab hits the same wall: the work is constant, small, and spread across machines, so most of it quietly never gets done. Mission Control is my answer — a status dashboard and a fleet of agents that pick work up without being asked.
The dashboard is the single pane. It polls every host and service on the network and renders one page: what is up, what is degraded, what is queued, and what an agent is doing right now. Watchdogs sit underneath it and restart anything that dies, so the fleet heals itself between the times I look at it.
The part I like most is how work gets in. Alongside the ordinary paths there is a voice one — hold a button on a headset, say what I want, and the transcript becomes an agent's brief. The agent edits, runs the tests, and comes back with a reviewed change instead of a promise. Push notifications close the loop when I am away from a desk.
None of it is a demo. It runs on hardware in my house, every day, and it only works because everything it touches had to be made restartable, observable, and safe to fail before it could be trusted to run unattended.
The homelab
The lab is the substrate everything else on this page runs on. A Proxmox host carries the infrastructure: virtual machines and containers split by job, each small enough to rebuild from notes rather than nurse back to health. The services I depend on daily — databases, sync, notifications, the printer monitor, the dashboard itself — live in containers of their own, so taking one down for maintenance is not an outage for the rest.
The constraint I designed around is that agents need room to work without being able to touch anything that matters. Sandboxes are cloned from a template, firewalled at the hypervisor rather than trusted to behave, and rolled back by snapshot when a run ends. An agent that breaks its machine breaks only that machine, and it comes back in seconds.
Inference stays in the house. The Windows machines serve models over the LAN, so the fleet can think without sending anything out.
Nothing is clustered, on purpose. Each node stands alone, because clustering a lab this size buys coordination I do not need and quorum failures I would rather not debug at 2am. It is boring exactly where it should be boring.
Design, slice, monitor, print
The Print Pipeline
The engineering half of 3D printing: a monitoring pipeline that watches the printer so I don't have to.
Print telemetry over MQTT, automatic timelapse capture, and alerts when a job fails at 3am. The objects it produces live in theStudio.
Build log — in progress
Robotics
The newest discipline, documented honestly as I learn it: what I'm building, what broke, and what it taught me.
Build log entries start as soon as the first chassis moves under its own power. Expect parts lists, failures, and short clips — not a finished showreel.
02
Studio
Off the clock it's paint, plaster, grout, a DAW, and a printer making objects instead of parts.
Paint, plaster, grout
Art
Paint, plaster, and grout — plus a Quest headset that's about to become a brush.
- Painting
- Sculpture
- Mosaic
- Painting
- Sculpture
- Mosaic
Next canvas is room-sized: murals painted in VR on a Quest, then brought back out into the physical world.
Production and sound design
Music
Tracks I wrote and produced. Waveform players land with the audio.
Track 01
Track 02
Track 03
Modelled, printed, kept
Printed Objects
The things the printer makes when it isn't making parts — modelled by me, kept because I liked them.
- GLB model — orbit viewer
- GLB model — orbit viewer
- GLB model — orbit viewer
Who's behind all this
About & Contact
I'm Colton — a network engineer by trade and a builder by default. Over a decade of Cisco IOS, BGP, and carrier Ethernet taught me how real infrastructure fails, which is why the AI systems I build now run on hardware I racked myself.
B.S. in Information Security and Forensics from RIT, High Honors. Off the clock it's paint, printers, a DAW, and a fly rod — the fish above being the one time all of that stopped at once.