Welcome to the Holocron: Who I Am and Why This Exists
The Short Version
I’m Tima Nlemvo an IT Engineer with 8 years in IT operations, now leveling up through infrastructure I build, break, and document myself.
This blog is the Alliance Holocron a technical archive of everything I’m learning, building, and solving across a production-grade home-lab environment. Writeups, incident forensics, project deep-dives, and the occasional hard-earned lesson.
Where I’ve Been
My career started on service desks and escalated from there, literally.
Creative Artists Agency (CAA) I managed asset lifecycle and procurement for, maintained Active Directory infrastructure, and led service desk operations while optimizing identity workflows and escalation paths.
Stagwell I sustained high reliability across enterprise IT systems and cloud applications. Managed macOS and Windows fleets using JAMF Pro and Intune. Worked closely with security teams to enforce policy compliance across a distributed agency network.
Team Liquid Currently operating and supporting production systems for competitive gaming and corporate environments. Tier III escalation across identity, endpoints, and core infrastructure. Access governance for 200+ users.
Every role taught me the same thing from a different angle: what production resilience looks like when it’s present and what breaks when it’s missing.
Why the Home-lab
Operational experience tells you what matters. It doesn’t always let you build it yourself.
The Alliance Fleet is how I’m closing that gap. It’s a 3-node Proxmox cluster running 25+ services SIEM, identity management, observability pipelines, network segmentation, GPU-accelerated AI workloads designed to mirror the standards I followed (and sometimes lacked) in enterprise environments.
This isn’t a tutorial follow-along. Every component exists because I wanted to understand why it works, not just how to configure it.
The Fleet at a Glance:
Node Codename Role
Node A Millennium Falcon AI/ML Compute - RTX 4000 Ada, Ollama, VFIO passthrough
Node B CR90 Corvette Data & Operations - PostgreSQL, InfluxDB, Authentik, Grafana
Node C Gozanti Cruiser Network & Security - Wazuh SIEM, AdGuard, Nginx Proxy Manager
Full architecture documentation lives in the Alliance Homelab Infrastructure repo.
What You’ll Find Here
The Holocron publishes three types of content, each with a different purpose and voice:
Writeups - Incident forensics and postmortems. These document real problems I encountered, investigated, and resolved on live infrastructure. Full methodology, CLI evidence, root cause analysis, and lessons learned. Written to the standard expected in production postmortems.
Projects - Architecture and implementation deep-dives. How I designed and built specific systems SIEM pipelines, identity platforms, AI stacks with the tradeoffs and decisions explained.
Blog - The broader picture. Career reflections, infrastructure philosophy, and the process of leveling up from IT operations into systems engineering.
The Operating Principles
These aren’t abstract ideals. They’re lessons from environments where outages had immediate consequences, applied daily in the Fleet:
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Design fault domains before deploying workloads
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Treat identity and network boundaries as foundational controls
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Favor explicit trust and default-deny over convenience
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Make observability and documentation first-class components
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Automate to reduce cognitive load, not just manual effort
Connect
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Portfolio: tima.dev
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GitHub: GitHub.com/timanlemvo
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LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/in/timanlemvo
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Twitter/X: @tee_ma3
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Email: timanlemvo@gmail.com
The Holocron is open. Transmissions inbound.