What this blog is for
Field notes from a one-person shop, fiber I ran, servers I administer, what AI is actually good at, and the work I do for my own family before I'd sell it to yours.
By Albert LaScola · #announcement
I’m Albert. I run Bulwark Black LLC out of Chimacum, Washington, Navy submarine veteran, SDVOSB, one-person shop. Rural Tech and Support is the side of the work that helps households, small businesses, and rural operators with the kind of IT, security, and AI work the big firms either won’t take or overcharge for.
This blog isn’t going to be a marketing channel. It’s going to be a working journal.
Most of what I’ll publish here is the technical version of “show your work”:
- Personal infrastructure. I run my own fiber, my own email server, my own staging-and-production cloud stack, and a CTI pipeline that ships a daily threat-intel brief. When something breaks, I’ll write about how it broke and what I changed.
- Real family and client work. What I actually fixed for my in-laws this month, with the obvious identifying details stripped. The pattern matters more than the names.
- AI, honestly. When AI is the right tool, I’ll say why. When a client asked me to build an AI thing and I told them no, I’ll write about that too. Anti-buzzword, pro-workflow-replacement.
- OT, SCADA, and detection engineering. Lessons from VMware’s Detection and Response Team, the submarine force, and teaching database systems and information governance at Western Washington University. Stuff that doesn’t fit on LinkedIn.
I’d rather publish one useful post a month than five generic ones a week. If something here helps you not get burned by your own technology, that’s the point.
If you want a notification when something new goes up, the daily brief is at the bottom of every page. And if any of this sounds like work you’d want me to do for you, contact me or apply to work together, both go straight to me, not a CRM.
Worked on something like this and want help applying it? Get in touch →