01 Microsoft Foundation
- Windows Server & Active Directory — DCs, GPO, DNS/DHCP
- Microsoft 365 administration
- Windows imaging & fleet rollout
- PowerShell scripting & automation
- Entra ID / identity across the stack
happily employed · always up for a good conversation
Casey Fontneau
IT Manager & Solution Architect
Simple, meaningful solutions for the modern workplace — AI-forward.
I lead a team of IT Solutions Specialists for a global manufacturer by day and build AI in my homelab after hours. Microsoft-rooted, endlessly curious, and convinced AI's impact will be greater than the inception of the internet.
$ whoami
casey.fontneau
IT Manager & Solution Architect @ Heat and Control
Microsoft-rooted · AI-obsessed · homelab-powered
$ ./skills --list ▋
click anywhere to run it →
01 — whoami
A kid who never stopped taking things apart.
It started with a keyboard and a mouse. My older brother pulled me into PC gaming before fifth grade — Counter-Strike, Half-Life, and long summers at Click-n-Connect, the internet cafe in Rancho Cucamonga, California, where a neighbor's copy of the original Far Cry basically rewired my brain. Back home in New Hampshire at fifteen, my family pitched in for my first machine: a Dell Dimension 3000 with a Celeron and a CRT the size of a microwave. I fell hard for modding, then talked my way into a job at Thinking Machine — a scrappy New Hampshire computer shop that taught me hardware to the bone, and kept a coffee table built from gutted iMacs as a running joke that Apple's best product was furniture. It folded the day Walmart started selling Dells.
From there I chased the work up the stack: ISP tech support to NOC analyst at Metrocast, where networking finally clicked (and the OSI model lodged itself in my head as Please Do Not Throw Sausage Pizza Away). Then cellular at Verizon — GSM, CDMA, the minor miracle of VoLTE — and the enterprise world at ScanSource, where an RFID cert and a few weeks shadowing the sysadmin team sent me straight into infrastructure. My first ESXi homelab went up not long after, and I never looked back.
Today I'm an IT Manager & Solution Architect at Heat and Control, leading a team across three countries and working alongside global IT to keep a worldwide business online.
Microsoft is still the bedrock, but lately I'm all-in on AI and LLMs — convinced they're the next foundation the way networking and virtualization once were, which is why this site doubles as its own AI project. And that kid from the proudly anti-Apple shop? Devoted Mac user since 2013, wrote this whole thing on a MacBook Pro. The iMac coffee table would not approve.
I grew up in a shop that turned old iMacs into a coffee table to dunk on Apple. Now I write all my code on a MacBook. Life's funny like that.
02 — the toolbox
What I actually build, break, and fix.
Microsoft roots, a habit of taking things apart until they make sense, and more hands-on mastery than alphabet-soup certs. Here's the stack — not a progress bar in sight.
02 Infrastructure & Virtualization
- VMware ESXi — home lab to production
- Hypervisors & full VM lifecycle
- Backups, DR & "why's it down at 2am" recovery
- Enterprise system administration
- Bare-metal builds — CPU, RAM, GPU, water cooling
03 Networking
- Subnetting & the OSI model (…Sausage Pizza Away)
- Routing & switching — Cisco ICND1 & ICND2
- Full UniFi networks — VLANs, firewall rules, the works
- Cellular fundamentals: GSM, CDMA, LTE, VoLTE
- ISP / NOC-grade troubleshooting under fire
04 Cloud & Endpoint
- Microsoft Azure
- Intune & modern endpoint management
- Conditional access & device compliance
- Cloud support & migrations
- Device fleets — POS, handheld PE, RFID (Alien Academy)
05 AI & LLMs
- Local LLM inference on an NVIDIA DGX Spark
- Open-weight models (Qwen 3 and friends)
- Voice pipelines — speech-to-text & TTS
- Tool / function calling (live Brave Search)
- Prompt engineering & agentic workflows
06 Automation & Home Lab
- Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 5 (M.2 SSD)
- Raspberry Pi tinkering — VPN, HomeBridge, more
- UniFi Etherlighting wired into Home Assistant
- 3D printing on a Bambu Lab printer
- Small electronics & soldering-iron projects
07 Leadership Across Borders
- Leading a team across 3 countries, supporting staff globally
- Solution architecture & technical roadmapping
- Vendor & stakeholder management
- Mentoring — I climbed the whole ladder, so I get it
- Turning "it depends" into a decision people can act on
$ currently obsessed with wiring LLMs into anything that holds still long enough — local inference, agentic tool calls, and shaving every last millisecond off a voice-in, voice-out round trip.
03 — the changelog
How I got here.
From modding a Dell Dimension in my bedroom to architecting IT across three countries. Every stop taught me something I still use.
-
The teenage hardware years
Thinking Machine
Repair Tech & Custom Builder
Pestered the owner of a tiny Rochester, NH shop until he hired me, then learned hardware to the bone — IDE drives, north/south bridge, CAS latency, CPU sockets. Proudly anti-Apple, with a coffee table built from gutted iMacs. It folded the day Walmart started selling Dells.
→ Hardware to the metal — IDE cables to water-cooled SLI towers
-
First real networking gig
Metrocast Communications
Support → Tier 2 Business → NOC Analyst
Worked up from basic tech support to NOC analyst at the local ISP — where networking finally clicked. Learned to subnet, burned the OSI model into memory, and tackled the Cisco ICND1 and ICND2 along the way.
→ Networking foundations + Cisco ICND1/ICND2
-
The South Carolina cellular chapter
Verizon Wireless
Tier II Tech Support
Followed my now-wife to South Carolina and went deep on cellular — GSM, CDMA, the first LTE, then VoLTE (a genuinely big deal on Verizon, since it finally meant voice and data at once). Interned with NetOps — a great crew, and a front-row seat to how carrier-scale networks really run.
→ Cellular internals from CDMA to VoLTE + a NetOps internship
-
Enter the enterprise
ScanSource
POS / Enterprise Support
Stepped into enterprise point-of-sale — barcode printers, Windows PE handhelds, self-checkout — and got RFID certified at "Alien Academy." Then I walked a mile with the sysadmin group, stood up my first ESXi lab and a domain controller, and knew infrastructure was the path.
→ RFID cert + the sysadmin bug — first ESXi lab & domain controller
-
Present day
Heat and Control
IT Manager & Solution Architect
Moved back to New Hampshire to start a family and joined Heat and Control — climbing from Help Desk II to III to System Administrator to Solution Architect, adding a manager title along the way. Today I lead a team across three countries with most of my curiosity pointed at AI.
→ Help Desk → SysAdmin → Solution Architect → Manager, across 3 countries
04 — stuff I've built
● live
● in production
● always tinkering
● ongoing build
● listen now
Projects & experiments.
Casual, hands-on, and mostly running in my closet right now. My favorite kind of work.
GaudeauAI flagship
A self-hosted personal AI platform — with a voice assistant that answers out loud in under two seconds.
My personal AI assistant, built end to end and running entirely on my own hardware. I talk to it from my iPhone anywhere in the world; it reasons with a local LLM, pulls live data off the web when it needs to, and answers back in a synthesized voice — the full round trip in about 1.5–2 seconds. No cloud LLM, no data leaving my rack.
// the round trip
- 1 iPhone connects home over an encrypted Tailscale VPN
- 2 I speak into the app; audio streams to the backend
- 3 Speech-to-text turns voice into a clean prompt
- 4 Prompt hits Qwen 3 — the local model doing the reasoning
- 5 Needs fresh info? It fires a Brave Search API call
- 6 The model folds the results into its answer
- 7 Text-to-speech synthesizes the reply
- 8 Audio streams back to my phone and plays aloud 🔊
✦ The whole thing runs on a DGX Spark in my closet — my voice assistant never phones a cloud LLM home. That ~1.5–2s includes a live web search, all between my phone and my rack.
Read the full deep-dive →HomeBrain
A self-hosted Home Assistant smart home, wired into the network at the rack level.
Whole-home automation running locally on a Raspberry Pi 5 (upgraded with an M.2 HAT+ and SSD so nothing leans on a flaky microSD). It doesn't just live on the network — it's fused to it.
- SSD boot over M.2 HAT+ kills the classic Pi corruption gremlins
- Local-first: automations fire even when the internet doesn't
- Integrated end-to-end with a full UniFi network — presence, client & network events feed automations
- Ties into UniFi Etherlighting — the rack lights up in sync with the house
✦ The rack is an ambient status display now — the house tells you how it feels in RGB. I glance at the rack instead of opening a dashboard.
Read the full deep-dive →Tinkering
3D printing, soldering irons, and the joy of making physical things.
Not everything worth building lives in a terminal. Between the software projects I keep a Bambu Lab printer humming and a soldering iron warm — it's where the software brain touches grass (and hot plastic).
- Functional prints — brackets, mounts, enclosures, rack accessories
- Custom parts for the homelab that don't exist off the shelf
- Small electronics — sensors and breakouts that feed Home Assistant
- Same debugging instinct as code, just with calipers instead of a stack trace
✦ Every homelab eventually needs a part that doesn't exist yet — so I print one. The failed-print graveyard is real, and every casualty taught me something.
See the builds →Home Network
A dual-purpose network, isolated by design.
One rack, two worlds: a locked-down isolated segment and a self-built smart home, sharing physical infrastructure but never trusting each other. Built on UniFi, hardened in numbered phases, and documented for its own rollback.
- Two segments kept L3-isolated behind a zone-based firewall
- The two worlds touch one rack — and still can't see each other
- Smart home wired in three ways, fully segmented
- Every hardening step numbered, with a rollback plan
✦ Two networks, one rack, zero trust between them. That's not a constraint I worked around — it's the whole design.
Read the full deep-dive →Vibe Code Vibes album
A 12-track AI concept album about building with Claude — with synced karaoke lyrics.
I wrote a concept album about vibe-coding with AI — written with it, and about it. Twelve tracks and a Claude-lore arc, wrapped in a custom player I built with Apple-Music-style lyrics that scroll and light up word by word. The word timings were force-aligned on my DGX Spark.
✦ Track 11, "Stateless," is written from Claude's point of view — the model singing back about the other songs. Press play; the words light up as they're sung.
Open the player →
05 — the rack tour
The homelab.
Everything here started as a "let me just try one thing" and quietly became production. It's where I break things on purpose so I don't break them at work.
The Sandbox
Raspberry Pi 4
Rotating experiment box — whatever I'm currently poking at.
- Reflashed constantly; surviving a week is basically a miracle
- Past lives: self-hosted VPN endpoint, HomeBridge bridge
- The "if it bricks, who cares" node — where ideas get proven
Home Base
Raspberry Pi 5 · M.2 HAT+ · SSD
Production Home Assistant host — the brain of the smart home.
- SSD over M.2 instead of an SD card — faster, far less likely to die
- Runs Home Assistant 24/7 for the whole house
- Officially "wife-approved uptime" — the bar every node aspires to
The Backbone
Full UniFi Network Stack
Routing, switching & Wi-Fi for the whole lab and home.
- End-to-end UniFi — gateway, switching & APs under one controller
- Rack dressed in Etherlighting, so the cabling actually glows
- Etherlighting wired into Home Assistant — the rack reacts to the house
The Inference Engine
NVIDIA DGX Spark
GaudeauAI backend — local LLM inference & the voice pipeline.
- Runs the full round-trip: STT → Qwen 3 → Brave Search → TTS in ~1.5–2s
- Serves the model locally — the reasoning never leaves the rack
- Reachable from my phone over an encrypted Tailscale tunnel
The Fabricator
Bambu Lab X2D (fully kitted)
3D printing & small hardware / electronics projects.
- Kitted out: AMS 2 Pro + AMS-HT, TPU feed assist, and the vision encoder
- Prints brackets, mounts & enclosures for the rest of the lab
- Where "why isn't there a part for this?" becomes a printed one by morning
06 — let's connect
Not hiring me — just saying hi.
I'm happily employed and not going anywhere, but I love talking shop with fellow IT nerds, homelabbers, and LinkedIn connections. The door's not locked — just closed. Knock anytime.