Hi, I'm Charles.

I have been pulling things apart to see how they work since I was a kid. I started out on computers back when the internet arrived down the phone line, screens were mostly text and a single picture took a minute to load. I taught myself to code, played a lot of online games and spent most of my time working out why they behaved the way they did. Half the fun was finding where the rules bent. I never wanted to break anything. I just had to know how it worked.

Then life took the practical route. For years I ran bodyshops and workshops in the motor trade. It is the kind of place where something is always on fire and the customer wants it done yesterday. I was good at it. I also knew it was not where I wanted to end up.

So I changed direction on purpose, back towards the thing I had always been drawn to. This was never a weekend hobby that got out of hand. It was a plan: learn the fundamentals properly, then build real kit I could break and rebuild until it made sense.

The homelab is where most of that learning happens. I run a full UniFi stack (a UDM Pro, a USW Pro Max 48 PoE switch and U7 Pro access points), a three-node Proxmox cluster on Dell OptiPlex boxes and TrueNAS for storage. The whole thing is split into eight VLANs with default-deny rules between them. There is a separate machine on its own isolated VLAN running Parrot OS, loaded with Nmap, Burp Suite, Metasploit and Wireshark. I have also run an authorised web application penetration test for a real organisation, worked to OWASP methodology and delivered the written report at the end.

These days I am studying for a Diploma in Network Engineering with the Open University, with a CCNA module lined up for later in 2026. The day to day sits across Linux, Proxmox, VLAN design, Suricata IDS, AI agent automation and self-hosted encrypted comms.

That mix is what led me to start Wolds Cyber, my consultancy. I help small businesses around York, the East Riding and North Yorkshire find the gaps in their security before someone else does. Then I tell them what I found in plain English, without the scare tactics.