About Me

Hi, I'm Will Tavares. The byline on my main page is accurate — technology problem solver, curious thinker, hobbyist photographer, homelab nerd. That's most of it.

By day I'm an IT infrastructure engineer — identity, cloud, servers, and the unglamorous plumbing that keeps everything upright. It's remote, which means my commute is roughly nine feet and my coworkers are two cats who have opinions about my meeting schedule.

I got here the long way. I was eight or nine when I started taking apart whatever old computers I could get my hands on — poking around inside Windows, standing up Active Directory, breaking things with group policies I didn't understand yet. By middle school, PC gaming had pulled me deeper into hardware, and the homelab started in earnest around the same time: a Plex server, then my own pfSense firewall, then everything after that. It's never really stopped growing. That's still how I learn — build it, break it, figure out why, build it again.

Out of high school, I did phone and computer repair, sales, and service, which is where you learn that most problems are people problems wearing a technical costume. Eventually I ended up in enterprise IT, and that's where the picture got bigger. You start seeing how companies actually operate — what they genuinely need, what they've been sold, and how often the technology ends up dictating the shape of the business instead of the other way around. The good work is making the tools fit the business. Not making the business fit the tools.

The same instinct runs through everything else. I like working with my hands — tools, cars, whatever's broken in the house this week. Matthew Crawford put it well in Shop Class as Soulcraft: the satisfaction of manual competence is that it makes you "master of your own stuff." Knowing how the things you depend on actually work, and being able to fix them, is a kind of freedom. It's the same reason I run my own infrastructure instead of renting someone else's.

The other half is photography. I've been leaning into it seriously for about five years now, and most of what I shoot ends up here.

No degree. I learned this the way you learn most things worth knowing — by doing it badly for a while first.

Southeastern Massachusetts, born and raised. Still here.