Nathan Black

layout: markdown_page
title: "Nathan's README"

Nathan's README

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

About Me

Born 1974 in Louisville, Kentucky. Father was an English/ESL adjunct professor; mother was a nurse educator in diabetes management. Both retired. Moved to Oklahoma at age 3.

Started in auto repair: shocks, struts, suspension, brakes, tires, wheels, alignments, oil changes. Changed direction.

Got a Commodore 64 in 1987. Learned BASIC, C, some assembler. Graduated high school in 1993 and spent that year in Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany. Started irq4 (consulting) the same year. Founded digitalboy networks in 1995, running Linux (Mandrake, later Red Hat) and Netatalk to serve Apple-based print shops in Oklahoma, then Madison, Wisconsin after I moved there in 1999.

Kerr-McGee in Oklahoma 1998-1999. Email administrator at the Wisconsin Department of Transportation 1999-2004. Moved to Austin, Texas in 2004 and joined Dell as a QE analytics engineer. 100% Linux and open source since 2004. Rackspace 2007-2019: sysadmin, devops, SE I, SE II, then Nebulous Operations (cloud SRE before the term).

Moved to Blacksburg, Virginia in 2016. Joined GitLab as a Senior Support Engineer in September 2019. Moved to GitLab Federal LLC and the US Federal team in July 2022, adding the Assigned Support Engineer role. Promoted to Staff Support Engineer on May 1, 2026.

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

Career

2026-now   Staff Support Engineer, GitLab Federal LLC (US Federal)
2022-2026  Sr Support Engineer + Assigned Support Engineer, GitLab Federal LLC
2019-2022  Sr Support Engineer, GitLab
2007-2019  Sysadmin -> DevOps -> SE I -> SE II -> Nebulous Operations, Rackspace
2004-2007  QE Analytics Engineer, Dell
1999-2004  Email Administrator, Wisconsin Department of Transportation
1998-1999  Kerr-McGee, Oklahoma
1995-?     Founder, digitalboy networks
1993-?     Founder, irq4
1993       Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany

Home Lab

Customer data is red-classified and never leaves my workstation. The lab makes AI-assisted work possible inside that boundary.

Network:

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

Compute and storage:

• 4x 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

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.

Beyond the Terminal

• 2014 Mazda MX-5 Miata (NC) project car
• Velotric GoMad utility ebike
• Vintage Macs, PPC and early Intel
• Five-plus acres next to Jefferson National Forest; I maintain a mile of gravel road

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