I'm Sterling Schwieger — a senior IT engineer and full-stack developer with 30+ years in the computer industry, happiest owning a problem from database to deployment. These days I focus on self-hosted AI infrastructure and platform engineering: clean architecture, pragmatic security, and building things that actually run in production, not just in a demo.
Most of what I know, I learned by building the hard version. The clearest example is Glass — a self-hosted MSP platform I architected and wrote solo: 16 microservices in PHP, Go, and Python, a local AI intelligence layer, a multi-tenant XDR engine, and a unified UI, running as ~29 Docker containers.
Building it meant making real decisions across every layer — schema design and indexing, service boundaries and auth, LLM pipelines with schema-enforced outputs, real-time WebSocket/WebRTC, and the DevOps to keep it all healthy behind mutual TLS. I like that breadth, and I like turning ambiguous requirements into systems that hold up.
I'm always interested in meaty engineering problems. If you're building something substantial — or want a hand making an existing platform faster, safer, or smarter — let's talk.
A working toolbox — everything here is used in real, running systems.
Map the real workflow before writing code. Good service boundaries come from understanding the business, not the framework.
Own-your-data services, explicit contracts, and event-driven messaging so pieces can evolve and scale independently.
Ship the real thing — with auth, validation, error handling, and tests — not a happy-path prototype that falls over in production.
Deploy it, watch it, and harden it. Metrics, logs, security digests, and a fast path from bug report to fix.
The fastest way to reach me is email. I read everything.