I’m Richard Applegate — I am Deaf Hard of Hearing and an IT Infrastructure engineer based in the coffee industry, currently managing fleet operations at Joe Coffee. Day to day that means keeping 2,000+ Android tablets online across store locations, wrangling POS hardware, and building the automation workflows that hold everything together.

Outside of work, I run a self-hosted homelab on a server I call applegateserver — an Ubuntu machine running a full Docker stack. It’s where I experiment with things I actually care about: local AI pipelines, self-hosted services, workflow automation, and the occasional project that probably has no business running on a home server.

I built this site from scratch using a custom CMS I wrote myself. I write here about infrastructure, homelab projects, tools I’m building, and whatever I’m currently debugging at 11pm.

I believe in owning your stack, keeping things simple, and documenting everything — even when you’re the only one who’ll ever read it.