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JW Justin White

About

I'm Justin — I make things, grow things, and pull things apart to understand how they work.

This site is a workshop notebook for four habits that keep overlapping. The builds come off a shelf of FDM and resin printers — functional parts, jigs, the occasional thing that started as a photo. The garden is hydroponics: growing food without soil and learning the chemistry the hard way. The lab is the home network and the boxes that run on it — the place I get to break real infrastructure safely. And the writeups are security walkthroughs from hands-on practice, the thread that ties the rest together.

The pattern is always the same: pick something up to learn one thing, then keep doing it because it's satisfying. A print becomes a print farm; a single resolver becomes a whole network; a practice box becomes a habit of asking "how would this actually break?" The security work is where the curiosity gets sharpest — figuring out how a system fails, then writing down how you'd stop it.

Most of what's here is mid-progress, and that's the point. If any of it is useful to you, that's a bonus.

Off the clock I build, grow, and break things. On the clock it's the same instinct at a much larger scale: I lead cybersecurity at Cooke, where I'm accountable for the global program — security architecture, governance and risk, compliance, and operations — across roughly 18,000 people in 17 countries. It's a heavy, operational business whose roots are in food and aquaculture rather than IT, which is what makes the work interesting. The hard part is less the tooling and more shipping controls a round-the-clock operation can actually live with, while still standing up to the auditors, insurers, and regulators who get a say in whether they're good enough.

The home lab and the writeups here are that same instinct with the stakes turned down: run real systems, watch how they actually fail, and write down what I learned so I don't relearn it the hard way. The Proxmox cluster, the firewall pair, the monitoring stack — none of it is production for anyone but me, which is exactly why it's a safe place to break things deliberately. The formal version of all this lives on the CV; this page is the part I'd rather talk about at a workbench.

Useless facts

Fastest on land
220 km/h, on a German autobahn
Fastest in the air
~900 km/h, in a 787
Countries visited
Canada, the US, Peru, Chile, Scotland, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Australia
Furthest from home
Saint John to Hobart, Tasmania — about 17,400 km
Furthest south
a basecamp in the Cupquelán Fjord, Chilean Patagonia
Furthest north
Glasgow, Scotland
Most off the ground
500 lb
Squat
350 lb best · 225 lb now
Bench
245 lb best · 165 lb now
Deadlift
450 lb best · 395 lb now

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