Nathan Black

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title: "Nathan's README"

Nathan's README

Staff Support Engineer, GitLab Federal LLC (US Federal team). Blacksburg, Virginia.

About Me

Born in Louisville, Kentucky. Father was an English/ESL adjunct professor; mother, a nurse educator in diabetes management. Moved to Oklahoma at age 3.

Mentioned in the Slackware 11 changelog (June 2006) for a permissions fix on the joe text editor's documentation packaging.

The handle "admiralboom" comes from a film character with a ship-shaped house and an hourly cannon.

What I'm Building

LLM modeling scaffolding, frameworks, and harnesses to automate support engineering tasks.

• Containerized AI coding agent wrappers that keep customer data on-workstation
• Cross-project retrieval using PostgreSQL with pgvector and hybrid RRF
• Service-account agentic GitLab workflows using PATs, glab, and MCP
• US Federal team enablement: raising GitLab product knowledge

Network:

• UniFi gateway (SE), several switches, 4 access points
• Redundant WAN: cable + T-Mobile cellular failover

Compute and storage:

• 3x Beelink SER5 (8-core AMD Ryzen, 32 GB DDR4, 1 TB SSD) as KVM hypervisors
• 1x Shuttle with Intel i5
• 2x QNAP NAS (1U rack + desktop), 16+ TB usable
• 1x GX10 ARM 128GB

Self-hosted services:

• Pi-hole
• Nextcloud
• Ollama with 8+ models
• Uptime Kuma
• Home Assistant
• NetAlertX
• Grafana + Prometheus

Personal Projects

• OCVM - OpenCode VM. Containerized wrapper around AI coding agents with cross-project session indexing (PostgreSQL + pgvector, nomic-embed-text via Ollama) and an MCP recall_sessions tool.
• Unravel - GitLab Pages site for technical writing. Used as RAG context for specialized Claude Projects.
• cfg - Dotfiles, including remember / recall scripts for capturing and retrieving command-line snippets.
• base_config - Ansible role for laying my dotfiles and base packages onto a new system.

How to Work With Me

• I operate at high RPM and can be intense. Tell me if I need to chill.
• Be direct. I struggle with soft feedback. Rip the bandaid off.
• @ me in a ticket or issue and I will add it to my list.
• @ me in Slack and I will stop what I was doing to check; high priority for me.
• DM/PM is lowest priority. I prefer open channels; use DMs when discretion is needed.

My Working Style

• I enjoy solving problems. Pairings are a joy; group pairings under five people are also wonderful.
• I enjoy building a clean repro of a stubborn issue.

Related Pages

• GitLab profile
• cfg - dotfiles
• base_config - Ansible role
• OCVM
• Unravel

Other Tools and Communities

• CNCF
• jessfraz/dockerfiles