Matthew Brahms
As a Platform Engineer, Matthew builds scalable, resilient systems and works to instill DevOps culture into the teams he embeds with (SLI, SLO, SLA, anyone?!). Previous roles have included DevOps Engineer, Linux Systems Administrator, and Site Reliability Engineer — oh, and professional Classical musician.
Originally from Columbus, OH, Matthew holds degrees from The Ohio State University and Carnegie Mellon University. He currently lives in Austin, TX, where he enjoys working with cloud native technologies in the age of AI.
Outside of work, you'll find him spending time with his family, training for a marathon, eating a whole-food plant-based diet, and talking or listening to all things Classical music.
Session
A year ago I wouldn't have imagined I'd be running my own fiber through my walls, self-hosting AI models, and managing it all with declarative infrastructure — at home. In the age of AI, having a consequence-free environment to build, break, and learn has become a real career advantage.
This talk walks through how I approached building a homelab from scratch: networking, hardware, DevOps principles applied at home, and running open source AI tools that directly sharpen my skills at an AI startup. Along the way, I reclaimed something that's easy to forget when everything lives in someone else's cloud — my family's data is ours again.
You don't need a big budget or a rack full of servers. You need a framework, some curiosity, and a willingness to pull some cable.