~/ABOUT · THE LONGER VERSION BUILDER, NOT A CODER · SOLO

About. The longer version.

XAVIER SCOTT · THYFWX

Started with a tablet. Loved playing Android games. Then I started poking around in the settings, watching tech videos, figuring out what made things tick. The family had one old Windows 7 desktop that ran everything fine. Slow, but it worked. Something about a machine being old and still doing the job stuck with me.

Builder, not a coder. I build with code, I just don't write it by hand. I design it, direct it, review every line, and ship it. Software, hardware, infrastructure. Not a bootcamp, not a degree program. Curiosity, time, and a willingness to break things and fix them again.

// 01 WHAT I ACTUALLY DO three things, one bench
// SOFTWARE

Vanilla web, edge backends.

Software. Vanilla HTML, CSS, JavaScript. No frameworks for the work you see here. The portfolio you are reading is pure static, served from Cloudflare Pages. The Nexus AI Terminal is the same: vanilla front end, AI proxy on a Cloudflare Worker.

Two months solo to ship something real with leaderboards, image generation, eight playable games, sixteen AI tools, four chat modes, accessibility built in from the start. I write the code, I direct the AI assistants, I keep the deploy honest.

// REPAIR

Old computer refresh.

Old computer refresh. People bring me machines they think are dead. Sluggish laptops, old Windows boxes, family Macs that take ten minutes to boot. Most of the time the hardware is fine and the software is just rotted.

Storage upgrade, clean install, sometimes a thermal paste job, and the thing runs like new again. I'm honest when something really is dead, but a lot less is than people assume.

// HOME LAB

Infrastructure, self hosted.

Home lab + infrastructure. A two node Proxmox cluster running the home side of my life. AdGuard Home for network wide DNS filtering, Home Assistant for automation, OpenMediaVault for storage, Portainer managing a Docker stack, netboot.xyz for network boot, Uptime Kuma watching all of it.

The cluster opens nothing inbound. Public pieces reach out through a Cloudflare Tunnel, so from the internet all you see is Cloudflare's edge. Full breakdown at /projects/homelab.

// 02 THE TOOLS I ACTUALLY USE no aspirational lists · what I open daily
// MACHINES M4 MacBook Pro for most of the work, plus a desktop computer at the same desk for when I need more screen and louder fans.
// TERMINAL cool retro term for the green CRT aesthetic, zsh as the shell, starship as the prompt. Modern CLI replacements through and through: eza instead of ls, bat instead of cat, btop instead of top, neovim instead of vim, lazygit when I want a TUI for commits.
// AI IN THE LOOP Claude and Gemini both, daily. Ollama running open models on a dedicated GPU in the home lab, always on, for fast inference without a cloud bill. A custom zsh function called fix that pipes a failed command into Gemini for diagnosis. The site you are reading was built with this loop.
// LANGUAGES JavaScript / Node primary. A bit of Java when needed. Whatever the project calls for, honestly.
// HOSTING Cloudflare Pages for the frontend, Cloudflare Workers for backend, KV for storage. Cloudflare Tunnels to expose the home lab safely. No traditional VPS, no Kubernetes. Edge first.
// LAB Proxmox VE on bare metal, two node cluster. LXC containers for most services, full VMs only when something needs deeper hardware access. The stack: Home Assistant, AdGuard Home, OpenMediaVault, Portainer, netboot.xyz, Uptime Kuma.
// 03 HOW I WORK method · filter · rhythm

One thing at a time. Ship it. Fix what people actually complain about. Skip the planning theater. The Nexus terminal you can use today was built like that, every feature came from either a real need or a specific request from someone who tried it. Nothing got built because a roadmap said so.

I run AI deeply in my workflow. Not as autopilot, not as a crutch. As a second brain. Research, writing, code generation, brainstorming. I cross check what it gives me. I throw out the parts that are obviously wrong. I take responsibility for the output either way. If something on this site is broken, that is on me, not on the model.

I have dyslexia. That changes how I work. I cut to the point faster than most because I have to. If something cannot be explained in plain language, I do not trust that it is understood. I avoid memorizing steps. I want to know why a thing works. That filter is responsible for how everything on this site is written and built, terse, no hand waving, direct.

// 04 WHERE I WORK FROM home · solo · bench + cloud

Home. Solo. The work from home setup is intentional. Most of what I do, code, design, repair diagnosis, infra, does not require a building full of other people. The home lab in the closet is part of the setup. The macOS workstation, the Linux workstation, the test devices, the iPads I rotate through.

I take repair work in person when the scope makes sense, and remote diagnosis sessions for everything else. Some problems I can solve with a screen share and an hour. Some need the board on the bench.

// 05 WHAT THIS SITE IS FOR workspace · showcase · contact form

This site is my workspace, my showcase, and my contact form. It is also a sandbox for things I want to learn, every feature on the portfolio root is something I wanted to figure out, from the matrix rain canvas to the live Proxmox uptime indicator. The Nexus terminal is the bigger experiment. The blog is where I put down what I learn from running both.

If you came here because your old laptop is dragging and you want to know if it can be saved, hit /contact and tell me what's on it. If you came for the AI terminal, the link is in the header. If you came because you are also building something on the edge, the blog is probably the most useful corner.

// 06 GET IN TOUCH direct · one inbox · one human

Direct: xavier@thyfwxit.com. I read every message. Response time is usually within 48 hours, faster if the email subject says "repair" or "urgent."

For everything else, the contact form on the homepage and the dedicated contact page both route to the same inbox.

CONTACT ME ›