Hi, I’m Sammy. I graduated from the University of Edinburgh in summer 2025 with an MMath (Masters of Mathematics). Now I work as an insurance consultant at LCP in London, where I’m studying to become an actuary while trying to bring technical skills into data analytics, automation, and tool building.

The Homelab

One of my hobbies is my homelab - a journey that started in 2020 during lockdown with my sister’s ancient Sony laptop. I installed Ubuntu Server, stuck it in a cupboard, and ran it headless. What began as a curiosity has grown into a serious (though still very much hobby-level) infrastructure setup.

Over the years, I’ve spent countless hours learning about networking, containerisation, deployment, and all the things that come with running your own systems. The homelab has evolved from that single laptop to something more substantial:

  • A new TrueNAS build I’m just finishing up
  • A home-made PiKVM with custom ATX power controls (soldered the circuit myself)
  • Proxmox experiments running on old laptop motherboards - a nice throwback to where this all started
  • Ongoing projects exploring how these tools work and how I can actually use them day-to-day

It’s a constant learning environment where I can break things without consequence and figure out how to fix them.

What I Do

At LCP, I work on insurance consulting and actuarial projects. I’m trying to apply the technical skills I’ve developed through my homelab hobby to solve real problems - building tools, automating workflows, and doing data analytics. Here’s to hoping that knowing your way around containerisation and deployment is useful in more contexts than just a home server cupboard.

I’m also interested in the intersections between mathematics, computing, and practical problem-solving. My background in pure mathematics gives me a particular way of thinking about problems, and I enjoy finding ways to apply that alongside more hands-on technical work.

This Website

This site serves as both a portfolio and a blog. I plan to use it to document homelab projects, share solutions to interesting problems, and write about things I’m learning. It’s as much a resource for my future self as it is a way to contribute to the broader community of people working on similar things.

The site itself is a project - built with Hugo, version-controlled with Git, and automatically deployed through GitHub Actions to the University of Edinburgh’s infrastructure. You can read more about how it’s built in my first post.

I really don’t know what this website will become, but I’m looking forward to finding out.

Get In Touch

If you’d like to connect or have questions about anything I’ve written about, you can find me on:

Last updated: January 2026