About
Hey, I’m Jake Kromer. I live in Marana, Arizona, and I’ve spent 10+ years as the person who gets called when something technical breaks and nobody’s sure why.
What I do Link to heading
Right now I’m a Technical Operations Engineer at Bright AI. Day to day, that means looking after 180+ Raspberry Pis out in the field, connected over cellular and Starlink, along with NVIDIA Jetson boards that run AI models right at the edge. When a site goes quiet, I’m usually the one digging through logs to find out why. Most of my effort goes into making sure I hear about problems before they turn into a drive out to the site. Mostly that means Python scripts that watch device health, connectivity and storage, and yell before things fall over.
How I got here Link to heading
I’ve ended up building or rebuilding the support function at a few different places:
- LawLytics (2012–2015): I was the first support hire, back when “support” meant DNS records, email migrations and a lot of explaining things to lawyers.
- SmartThings (2015–2019): I was a support lead there, debugging smart home devices and developer API integrations, years before Matter was a thing.
- Family Life Radio (2019–2022): I led a 12-person tech team keeping 42 remote radio sites on the air over SSH, and rebuilt their whole support setup in Jira and Confluence.
- Bright AI (2022–now): I was the second support hire, and I built the support function from scratch again.
Along the way I’ve picked up the habit of automating whatever I’d otherwise do by hand twice. I also use Claude every day for diagnostics, scripting and documentation.
Off the clock Link to heading
My home lab is basically the job, just without the tickets:
- A Fedora server running around 20 Podman containers, tied together with Tailscale
- Home Assistant juggling Z-Wave, Zigbee, Matter and LoRaWAN devices, with a Mosquitto MQTT broker in the middle
- A couple of open source Docker images, caddy-vultr and caddy-cloudflare, with 10K+ downloads between them
I’m also an FAA Part 107 certified drone pilot.
Why this blog Link to heading
Mostly to write down the things I figure out, so the next person, or future me, doesn’t have to figure them out again. Expect posts on self-hosting, home automation, Linux and whatever else I’m tinkering with.