Paul Walko

Virginia Tech, Blacksburg VA
Computer Science BS (Fall 2018)
Cyber Security minor

I am very experienced with Linux and DevOps including AWS, Observability, and general cloud management.
I frequently experiment with containers, data hoarding, and other random things with my personal homelab.

Here's my résumé for more information.

maps.caving.dev: This is a self-hosted instance of Mergin Maps, which will hopefully get a lot of use on Caving expeditions next summer. GIS data management is notoriously difficult to manage, especially with lots of cavers who don't have funds for a professional option.
cavepedia-v2: This is an in-progress upgrade from git.seaturtle.pw/pew/cavepedia, but with an upgraded search engine using vector embeddings instead of go's bleve engine. Unfortunately this was somewhat put on hold due to my colo provider getting evicted in September 2025. (protip: don't use the cheapest hosting possible!)
github.com/paulwalko/faketec-co2: Deployed at the NSS Convention in June 2025, this is a custom meshtastic firmware with co2 monitoring support. This allowed us to deploy roughly 12 nodes throughout the campus and monitor co2 levels in sessions from a remote Grafana dashboard.
github.com/webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler: Browsertrix is a self-hosted web archival tool that, unlike tools like archive.is that archive a single page, collects a webpage and all pages linked to from the page. Due to its complexity the only official method of running it is on kubernetes.
social.bigcavemaps.com: Self-hosted Mastodon instance.