About

Servus — I’m Flo.

I live with my family, a few chickens and a chronically oversized garden in southern Lower Austria. By day I build IT infrastructure — Linux, Kubernetes, cloud, and everything involving certificates. By night, depending on the season: raised beds, radio sensors, vinyl records, or this blog.

I came to IT via a detour, and it still shapes who I am. I trained as a retail clerk at a discount grocer — old school: hundreds of PLU codes memorised because the till had no search function. Change counted up by hand because the display didn’t show it — in hindsight my first algorithm: add instead of subtract, because it’s faster and less error-prone. And I learned FIFO at the yoghurt shelf, years before I knew computer science had an acronym for it. Plus the quintessential discounter training: work efficiently with a lean crew and ruthlessly drop what doesn’t matter.

Later I helped run a store as deputy manager — alongside a store manager I learned a great deal from and to whom I owe a lot, personally and professionally. When the IT hobby became a profession, the detour suddenly wasn’t one: anyone who has done a stocktake while the store keeps running understands incident management in a very practical way.

This blog is, above all, my external memory. I write down what I’ll need again myself — measurement series from the garden, pitfalls from the homelab, notes from projects. If any of it saves someone else a detour, all the better. Much of it is work in progress, not truth; where I’m unsure, I say so.

Away from the keyboard, a good part of my time goes into our village tourism association, which runs the drag lift on the Quellenwiese — from winter operations to everything else the year brings. I’m also active in the volunteer fire brigade. Where volunteering and IT meet, things emerge like the microwave link that supplies the lift with internet, or my ordering system for festivities — originally written so the bar doesn’t drown in paper slips. Beyond that: digitising vinyl records, cooking, and learning Italian at a modest pace but with joy.

Everything on this site is personal and reflects solely my own opinion — neither that of my employer nor of the associations and organisations I volunteer with.