Pictures of my Home Setup

24 U server rack (double sided) and our cooling setup for the hot months. 

Home computer setup and desk:

Some Previous Portfolio Screenshots

This is my personal github that I use for side projects or just public work: https://github.com/xianthe. I do have access to multiple viacomCBS (Paramount) repos, but I am not signed in to the platform currently. There should be enough here to have samples of my work. 

This is the nick music web scraping project. I remote into the VM using VSC and a WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) VM. I use both zsh and Ubuntu for this project. This is the editor I use right now but I can use vim and emacs, and have used multiple others over time. I am also trying out some of the newer editors like Comet just to see what they offer.

I set up gitlab for this project and I'm still hosting it for Paramount, this is running from our servers in the house. These are private repos for myself, our gaming hobbies or older projects we developed. This is also where the work is done for the discord plugins we run or write.

Example blog I whipped up for a friend who wants to learn coding:

This is on another github account than my main one: https://xiantai-shinigami.github.io/casca-list/

Representing Trion at a SF Game Conference with other devs and community staff:

Atlas Reactor mascot and one of our office dogs: 

Some of my whiteboarding for an email verification project that I developed during the brainstorm and planning stage:

One of our games Atlas Reactor and doing some steam updates and posting initial events so our community team can take over that role. 

Me doing some debugging in Postman for a REST API probably related to the CAS SSO project.

We have a large Plex instance at the house which is one of my hobbies with several petabytes of data. Plex is a media server like having your own Netflix library for your own media. Here is me helping a friend with Chinese translation in 2016.

The SSO library that I had to upgrade at Trion to work on all our platforms. I was the sole developer. Some of this work was in PHP, some in JS, Apache Tomcat, Apache Struts and many components in our auth and payment systems for the Java stack. All work was completed and all upgrades rolled out to production to prevent several critical CVEs. Initial patches were also done by me to prevent CVEs that could not wait for the project completion.

A sample of the Agora Games (MLG eSports) brochure site custom PHP CMS, Drupal and WordPress interface with one of the pages I authored details on. I've done several for various sponsors like Old Spice, Frito Lay, Bic (the shaving company), Hot Pockets, PNCBank and many others. Usually quick turn around projects with specs given for the ads and any custom functionality they would like for call to actions.

KeePass was my first password manager that I started using in the mid 2000s, from there I've used 1Password and now on Bitwarden.

JIRAs for our R&D and Development teams at ENA that I was scrum master for. This is the role that I did all deployments for on the Linux side using Puppet and all front-end development for our multiple tools as an educational ISP. This stack was backbone.js, PHP and several other languages. There was a ton of sysadmin and DevOps work. We had our own wireless APs and hardware customized for our clients. Our team of 4 also ran the on-premises data center in our office and were responsible for the development environments or tricky customer hardware issues.

Intro to C guide I keep revisiting when I have downtime. I also have the original Kernighan and Ritchie 1988 which is probably still in a box downstairs somewhere.

Doing admin work in Hootsuite for social media management at various startups.

Working on FB marketing integration for Trion games. I was the only admin for the company.

Balsamiq wireframing tool which I've used on a few projects. I usually use Figma these days or an online free tool for quick whiteboarding.

Lore written out on our team whiteboard at work for Trove (a MMORPG version of a game like Minecraft.)

Fixing Windows Credentials and Mapped Network Drive

Broken PC 🔧🛠️👨‍🔧

I have two main PCs I use for development. One is basically my old main pc that is now turned into a streaming / second monitor / storage device. I have a few old and mirrored drives on it that were broken with the move and/or networking changes.

I remapped the drive this morning and ran into a few issues and fixed them. I don't know PowerShell commands off the top of my head nor some of the internals of Microsoft Networking but with a bit of searching I run the commands needed to fix this issue. I have some other tasks and older VMs I need to work on so fixing these issues is step one.

While working on this, I found out the Hyper-V Network Adapter was missing from Device Manager in Win 11. When I went to reboot to ensure the hypervisor was working, I got stuck in a a boot loop. I  haven't installed recent updates in a while, but with Windows it is possible it snuck something in.

I was in the middle of working on the most recent post when this happened. So I spent an hour or two fixing my Windows 11 machine.

I initially blamed Windows because I thought the recent boot loop / update issues struck. I was wrong. I have updates paused and I haven't had a major feature update since January 2025. Just the security updates. It ended up being some issues with the network stack:

I ended up having to do Windows Recovery and sfc /scannow to fix the Windows system files. I also did the DISM command to make sure the other system files were good.

Updating the MacBook

The MacBook is my portable workstation and webcam/meeting machine so I haven't updated it since before moving.

Did this while waiting for my main computer to reboot after a windows update and fixing a mapped drive/networking issue. I'll make a post for that next. The issue is fixed just making sure Windows 11 is stable before I continue. I have quite a bit of RAM on the main computer and it can take up to 10m to reboot from a cold start. 

(Also trying out a *new* feature from Blogger for direct links to Google Search, so apologies if any links are not correct.)