About — charlie.tools

I'm the Cloud and Communications Supervisor at Altra Federal Credit Union, where I lead the team responsible for our Microsoft 365 tenant, Azure footprint, telephony, and the network that ties our 17 branches together. This blog is where I write down the things I had to figure out the hard way so the next person doesn't have to.

How I got here

I didn't take a straight line into IT. As a kid I was fascinated by technology and constantly took things apart to see how they worked. Putting them back together was a separate and often unsuccessful problem. I was one of those curious kids who asked a million questions and got into everything. Props to my parents for not losing their minds.

In middle and high school I got into theater. Acting, singing, and performing on one side; technical work, stagecraft, and stage crew on the other. Both set the foundation for who I am today.

College was a meander. I started in Music Education, switched to a BM in Voice Performance, and couldn't stay focused on any of it. It wasn't the right field for me. It was the right place at the right time, though, because I met my wife and some of my closest friends there. Eventually I dropped out to chase a career.

That career started as a side job at a Family Entertainment Center that opened while I was in school. Managing the swipe cards and point-of-sale system landed on me by default because I had a knack for tech. I called the vendor's support team constantly. Sometimes about real bugs, more often with questions like "how do I do this?" or "hey, could we make it do xyz?" One day the support manager, who by then knew me well over the phone, said, "Why don't you just come work for us?" So I did.

I moved to the Dallas/Fort Worth area and joined the Systems and Service Delivery team at Embed Card Systems. Somewhere between accepting the offer and actually moving, my girlfriend became my fiancée. She stayed in Wisconsin to finish her undergrad; I flew back and forth constantly, and we got married in Wisconsin.

After the wedding we looked at each other and asked why we were living so far away from our families. That's when Altra came into view. My best man had started there and gave me a referral for a help desk job with the assurance that Altra tries hard to promote from within. He was right. I worked the help desk for nine months, got promoted, and have been promoted several more times since. I also closed out the music degree somewhere in that stretch as a BA in Music, and later went back for an MBA.

Along the way I discovered I like the plumbing of enterprise IT. Identity boundaries. Weird Exchange hybrid edge cases. The PowerShell one-liner that saves a team an hour a week. The SPFx extension that quietly fixes a workflow nobody complained about but everybody hated. That's most of what ends up here.

What I work on at Altra

At a credit union our size, "cloud and communications" covers a lot of ground. On any given week that can mean:

Microsoft 365 E5 administration (Exchange hybrid, Teams, SharePoint Online, Intune, Defender, Purview, Entra ID)
SharePoint Framework development and governance for our intranet
Networking and telephony across a 17-branch footprint
Leading and mentoring a small team of engineers

What I work on after hours

I run a 5-node Proxmox cluster with Docker Swarm, dual UniFi Pro Max gateways in VRRP, and probably more monitoring than any home needs. I'm also building Foxhound, a DCIM application (Fastify, React, TypeScript, Postgres) that started as a network topology viewer and turned into a full infrastructure management platform with floor plans, rack photo scanning, and NetBox integration.

Beyond the rack, I do mobile AV work for professional events (Q-SYS, Dante, MTR integration, the whole stack) and dabble in WLED and Zigbee to keep the smart home mostly smart and mostly working. Most of what I know about enterprise infrastructure, I learned first by breaking something in my basement.

Away from the keyboard

Mostly I love my family and playing with my kids. We live in Onalaska, Wisconsin, and they're the best part of every day. When I do pry myself away from MAGNA-TILES and bedtime stories, I brew beer a few times a year with four other guys. It's mostly an excuse to hang out, though the beer keeps getting better. I also spend a lot of time at the smoker. Low and slow, mostly pork and brisket, with the occasional experiment my wife is generous about.

What you'll find here

PowerShell scripts and patterns from real tenant work
SPFx and SharePoint development notes, including hard-won lessons about SPO governance at a regulated institution
Microsoft 365 and Entra ID administration, security, and compliance
Homelab experiments: Proxmox, Docker Swarm, UniFi, monitoring, self-hosting
Occasional AV and home automation detours when they intersect with the rest of it

Why I write

Two reasons. First, writing a thing down is how I confirm I actually understand it. A half-finished draft has saved me from shipping a bad decision more than once. Second, I've spent a lot of my career being rescued by strangers' blog posts, forum answers, and late-night GitHub issues. This is me paying some of that back.

One editorial standard: if I make a technical claim, I'll back it up with a link to the documentation, another blog post, a GitHub issue, or whatever I leaned on to figure it out. When I'm writing about something I pieced together myself and can't find public documentation for, I mark it clearly so you can read it knowing the only evidence is me.

Elsewhere

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, positions, or policies of Altra Federal Credit Union or any other organization I'm affiliated with. Content here is provided for informational purposes only and is not professional advice.