ABOUT ME

Hi, I'm Will Tavares. The line on my home page is accurate: technology problem solver, curious thinker, hobbyist photographer, homelab nerd. That covers most of it.

By day I'm an IT infrastructure engineer. Identity, cloud, servers, and the plumbing nobody thinks about until it stops working. It's remote, so my commute is about nine feet and my coworkers are two cats with opinions about my meeting schedule.

I got here the long way. At eight or nine I was taking apart whatever old computers I could get my hands on, poking around in Windows, setting up Active Directory, and breaking things with group policies I didn't understand yet. PC gaming pulled me further into hardware in middle school, and that's when the homelab started: a Plex server, then my own pfSense firewall, then everything after that. It hasn't stopped growing. That's still how I learn. Build it, break it, figure out why, build it again.

After high school I did phone and computer repair, sales and service. That's where I learned most problems start with a person, not the device. Eventually I moved into enterprise IT, and the picture got bigger. You see how companies actually run, what they really need, what they've been sold, and how often the technology ends up deciding how the business works instead of the other way around. The good work is making the tools fit the business.

Outside the day job, I help small businesses, nonprofits and individuals with the same kinds of problems. I've worked with everyone from sole proprietors to large enterprises, and I sit on the client's side of the table. I'm not selling anything and I'm not a managed service provider. A lot of the time, the most useful thing I can tell someone is that they don't need to buy what they're being sold. What I like best is building something that works, handing it over and moving on to the next problem.

The biggest project so far is the Pembroke Citizen Journal, our local nonprofit paper. I built its website and the systems behind it, and I volunteer there too, reporting mostly on town government and public safety.

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: manual competence 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 and keep my data on hardware I own instead of renting someone else's.

The other half is photography. I've been taking 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.