Open to workAvailable for Junior SysAdmin & IT consulting & Junior Quant →
Lugano · Switzerland · USI Economics student
Pietro
Quintavalle
Systems Engineer · Developer · Homelabber

Economics models incentives under constraints; infrastructure models constraints under load. I like sitting where those two disciplines overlap.

5+ years building production-grade infrastructure from the ground up. I design resilient systems and write the software that runs on top of them, then secure and monitor all of it myself.

Get in touchExplore homelabView projects
90%+ uptimeProduction servers
4 serversUnder management
5+ yearsSysAdmin experience
BSc EconomicsUSI · Ongoing
IT · EN · DE · ES · NO5 languages

About me

Hi, friends call me Quinta. I’m an Economics student at USI Lugano and a self-taught systems engineer who’s been running homelab infrastructure since 2020.

My setup spans everything from bare-metal Proxmox clusters to DNS and domain management via Cloudflare, Pangolin/Traefik reverse proxying, and a full media+music automation pipeline.

On the academic side I’m deepening my understanding of microeconomics, macroeconomics, game theory, and quantitative finance, finding more overlap with systems thinking than you’d expect.

Lugano, Switzerland
USI Economics student
Open for work
Junior SysAdmin · IT consulting · Junior Quant
Daily driver
Ryzen 7 9800X3D · RTX 5080 · hand-built keyboard
5 languages
IT · EN · DE · ES · NO

Technical Arsenal

Core stackSystems & infrastructure,
5+ years hands-on
ProxmoxDocker / LXCAnsibleLinuxZFSCloudflare / TraefikTailscaleFail2Ban / CrowdSecGrafana / Prometheus
▪Applied: used in production or a shipped project▫Exposure: coursework or limited use
01
System & InfraPlatforms
Proxmox VEUNRAIDTrueNASDockerLXCKVMLinuxWin ServerAD
02
Network & SecurityInfrastructure
VLANCloudflareAAAA/DNSCF TunnelsTailscaleFail2BanCrowdsecUFWAutheliaTraefik
03
DevelopmentLanguages / tools
PythonTypeScriptReactNext.jsDjangoSQLBashAnsibleHTML/CSSSoldering
04
Data & MonitoringObservability
GrafanaPrometheusUptime KumaZFSrsyncRAIDcAdvisor
05–08
Economics & Quant
05

Microeconomics

Consumer theoryMarket structuresProduction & costsPrice theoryWelfare econ.
06

Macroeconomics

GDP & growthMonetary policyFiscal policyIS-LM modelOpen economy
07

Game Theory

Nash equilibriumDominant strategiesExtensive formMechanism designAuctions
08

Quantitative Finance

Time value of moneyProbabilityStatisticsRegressionFinancial modelling
09
Certifications
GA
Data Analytics Professional Certificate
Google
Verified
GA
IT Support Professional Certificate
Google
Verified
MS
Foundations of IT Systems, Networking & Data Protection
Microsoft
Verified

Homelab Infrastructure

Started with a single Proxmox node: my first real server, and the one that taught me virtualisation and LXC. When file storage and parity-protected array management outgrew that setup, I built Nargothrond: a dedicated UNRAID box, named after the hidden fortress from The Silmarillion. Every service containerised, every entry-point proxied, every failure logged.

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Hardware
ComponentUNRAID Server (Nargothrond)Proxmox Node
CPUIntel Core Ultra 5 225Intel Core i7-8700
MotherboardASUS Prime Z890M-Plus-
RAM48GB DDR5 5600MHz32GB DDR4
CaseJonsbo N6-
Storage14TB + 2×12TB parity array + 2TB NVMe cache + 1TB NVMe bootSSD (OS) + SATA pool
Network10GbE (Realtek RTL8127) + 1Gbps LAN · VLANs1Gbps LAN · VLANs
OSUNRAID 7.3.1Proxmox VE 8
AccessPangolin + TraefikTailscale + SSH
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Services & Stack
01
Traefik + Pangolin
Pangolin (WireGuard-based, identity-aware tunnel) publishes services externally with zero open inbound ports; Traefik routes by hostname and handles automatic TLS. Cloudflared runs a second outbound tunnel for select services.
PangolinTraefikWireGuardCloudflaredAuto-TLS
02
AdGuard Home + Unbound
Network-wide DNS filtering on its own macvlan (br0) IP so it’s visible to every LAN device. Unbound handles recursive resolution, keeping DNS queries private end-to-end.
AdGuard HomeUnboundmacvlanSplit DNS
03
CrowdSec + Gluetun
CrowdSec watches logs and bans malicious IPs in real time using community threat intel. Gluetun routes the download client through an encrypted VPN tunnel with a kill switch, so it never touches the LAN directly.
CrowdSecGluetunKill switchIntrusion detection
04
Jellyfin + *Arr Stack
Jellyfin streams the library with iGPU transcoding. Seerr lets family request titles, which flow into Sonarr/Radarr; Jackett and Byparr proxy indexers; qBittorrent (VPN-locked via Gluetun) handles downloads.
JellyfinSeerrSonarrRadarrJackettByparrqBittorrent
05
Navidrome + Music
Navidrome serves a lossless personal library Spotify-style. Lidarr tracks favorite artists and new releases; slskd taps the Soulseek network for rare or indie finds.
NavidromeLidarrslskdSubsonic API
06
Immich + Vaultwarden
Immich (with dedicated PostgreSQL + Redis) is a self-hosted Google Photos replacement for phone backups. Vaultwarden syncs passwords across every device. Both live on an isolated network alongside the reverse proxy and IDS.
ImmichPostgreSQLRedisVaultwarden
07
Network Segmentation
Six Docker networks isolate containers by sensitivity: bridge, tunnel, explo_default, a dedicated pangolin network for the security-critical core, macvlan for AdGuard, and a Tailscale overlay for Jellyfin/Immich remote access.
Docker networkingTailscaleVLANsZero-trust
Zero open ports via Tailscale + Cloudflare Tunnels
All services reachable remotely through a combination of Tailscale mesh VPN (for trusted devices) and Cloudflare Tunnels (for public-facing services). No port-forwarding. Pangolin’s Newt agent tunnels external traffic into the private LAN.
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Traffic Flow
OutsideInternal networkPhoneoutside the houseCloudflare / Pangolintunnel · no open portspasses through tunnelLAN devicephone · laptop · TVAdGuard HomeDNS filteringTraefikroutes by hostnameTarget appJellyfin · Immich · …IoT devicesmart bulb, etc.no route to corePublic path (tunnel)LAN-only pathBlocked (VLAN isolated)RequestResponse
Request out, response back the same way
A phone outside the house requests a photo backup → it passes through the Cloudflare/Pangolin tunnel (no open inbound ports) → Traefik routes it by hostname to the target app (e.g. Immich), which loads the photos and responds back along the same path.
Spun up on demand, not left running
A Satisfactory game server, FileFlows for media re-encoding, and an sftp-server for bulk transfers stay fully configured but stopped until a specific project or game night needs them, keeping idle power draw down.

Personal Workstation

Daily driver and dev machine. Built around AMD’s 3D V-Cache architecture for a blend of high single-threaded performance and serious GPU compute. It doubles as a gaming rig, 3D modelling workstation, and 3D printing controller.

ComponentSpec
CPUAMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D (8c/16t · 3D V-Cache)
GPUZotac RTX 5080 Solid OC
RAM32GB DDR5 6000MHz
MotherboardGigabyte X870E AORUS PRO X3D ICE
OSCachyOS
RoleDev · Gaming · 3D Modelling · 3D Printing · Daily Driver
01
AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
Zen 5 architecture with 96MB 3D V-Cache. Exceptional single-thread and gaming performance, with low-latency cache access ideal for simulation and data-heavy workloads.
Zen 58c / 16t96MB L3 3D V-Cache5.0GHz boost
02
Zotac RTX 5080 Solid OC
Blackwell architecture. 16GB GDDR7, hardware ray tracing, DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation. Used for gaming, 3D rendering, and GPU-accelerated dev and compute tasks.
Blackwell16GB GDDR7DLSS 4MFGCUDARay Tracing
03
X870E AORUS PRO X3D ICE
Gigabyte X870E flagship board with PCIe 5.0, USB4, and optimised X3D power delivery. Supports DDR5 6000MHz XMP out-of-the-box. White aesthetic matches the build’s ICE theme.
X870EPCIe 5.0USB4DDR5 6000WiFi 7

Personal & Client Projects

01
Professional Client
Live
Enterprise Proxmox Cluster
Full single-node virtualisation with VLAN segmentation, Pangolin/Traefik reverse proxy, Cloudflare Tunnels, and centralised Grafana/Prometheus monitoring. 90%+ uptime maintained.
ProxmoxDockerLXCTraefikTailscale
02
Professional Client
Live
9-User RAID 10 NAS
TrueNAS on RAID 10 serving as a self-hosted cloud for 9 users. Per-user ACLs, automated rsync offsite backups, ZFS snapshots for instant point-in-time recovery.
TrueNASRAID 10ZFSrsyncACLs
03
Personal Project
Open Source
Valgo: Algorithm Visualizer
Step-by-step algorithm visualisation built with React and Next.js. Sorting, graph, and search algorithms with live code annotations and speed controls.
ReactNext.jsTypeScriptTailwind
04
Personal Project
Open Source
Riptune: Terminal Music Client
Terminal-native music client for Subsonic-compatible servers (Navidrome, Airsonic, Gonic), built in Rust for the niri Wayland compositor, with MPRIS2 D-Bus control, SQLite-cached library for instant startup, and inline album art via Kitty/Sixel graphics.
RustratatuiSubsonicMPRIS2tokioSQLite
05
Personal Homelab
Live
Self-Hosted Stack (IaC)
Entire homelab reproduced from code: Ansible playbooks, Docker Compose, and Bash scripts. Idempotent provisioning; full rebuild in under 30 minutes from scratch.
AnsibleComposeBashIaC
06
Personal Project
Open Source
re-soulcommand
Music recommendation downloader integrating ListenBrainz and Last.fm playlists with Navidrome via slskd (Soulseek daemon). Fork rebuilt around a REST API backend, stripped of bloat and Docker-native.
PythonDockerListenBrainzLast.fmslskdNavidrome
07
Personal Homelab
Live
Ainulindale: Music Stack
Fully self-hosted music discovery and streaming platform. Auto-discovers music weekly from listening habits, downloads via Soulseek P2P through a VPN gateway, streams via Navidrome. No commercial services required.
DockerNavidromeslskdGluetunListenBrainzProtonVPN
08
Personal Homelab
Live
UNRAID Home Server
Intel Core Ultra 5 225 build running UNRAID 7.3.1 as primary NAS, Docker host, and media stack. Parity-protected array with NVMe cache, 9-user SMB/NFS shares, and all homelab services containerised.
UNRAID 7.3.1DockerParity Array48GB DDR5SMB/NFS
09
Personal Homelab
Live
Proxmox Virtualisation Node
Intel Core i7-8700 node running Proxmox VE 8 for LXC containers and KVM VMs. VLAN-segmented network, Tailscale + SSH access, acts as the compute backbone for all hosted services.
Proxmox VE 8LXCKVMTailscaleVLAN32GB DDR4
10
Personal Project
Open Source · ★ 26
ObsidianSetup
Cross-platform utility script that makes installing Obsidian and its plugins consistent across devices, with PowerShell and Bash installers driven by a single plugins.json manifest.
PowerShellBashObsidianAutomation
11
Academic Project
Open Source
Boston Housing Price Prediction
Probability & Statistics coursework at USI. Built and evaluated regression models on the classic Boston housing dataset to predict median home values from neighbourhood features.
Pythonscikit-learnRegressionJupyterStatistics

More projects at github.com/Quinta0 ↗

Open Source Contributions

External pull requests and issues resolved in other maintainers’ codebases, work landed in repos I don’t own.

libratbag/libratbag

Reverse-engineered the full USB HID protocol (via Wireshark/USBPcap capture analysis) for an unsupported gaming mouse and wrote a complete libratbag driver from scratch: DPI, polling rate, debounce, and button remapping, with persistence verified on real hardware.

CPR #1873

libratbag/piper

Companion contribution to the driver above: custom device artwork and Piper GUI integration so the new mouse is recognised and configurable in the Piper front-end.

SVGPR #1121

ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux

Diagnosed and fixed a Steam Linux Runtime install bug via config.vdf and appmanifest inspection after all standard recovery paths (integrity verification, manifest wipes, steamcmd re-install) failed; workaround adopted by other affected users.

debuggingIssue #13248

Recol/DLSS-Updater

Diagnosed a UI state bug where a popup overlay fired a spurious mouse-exit event, desyncing the card footer from an open dropdown menu; decoupled footer state from raw hover signal to fix it. Verified across 3 cold-launch cycles with tab-switch latency logging at the maintainer’s request before merge.

PythonPR #252

Recol/DLSS-Updater

Fixed game card image/text alignment and added a light-theme background fade for readability; implemented click-to-open DLL details on the card itself, resolving an accessibility issue by reusing the existing dialog handler instead of adding a new entry point. Verified across light/dark themes with tab-switch latency held under 200ms.

PythonPR #256

My Projects on GitHub

The complete repository list, including the projects featured above, plus the smaller tools and documentation that support them.

Quinta0/re-soulcommand

Music recommendation downloader: ListenBrainz & Last.fm playlists into Navidrome via slskd. Author & maintainer.

PythonRepo

Quinta0/riptune

A terminal-native music client for Subsonic-compatible servers (Navidrome, Airsonic, Gonic), built for the niri scrollable-tiling compositor.

RustRepo

Quinta0/Ainulindale

Self-hosted music discovery & streaming stack: auto-discovery, Soulseek P2P download via VPN, Navidrome streaming. Author & maintainer.

ShellRepo

Quinta0/Nargothrond

Documentation for full homelab provisioning.

docsRepo

Quinta0/ObsidianSetup

Cross-platform Obsidian + plugin installer, driven by a shared plugins.json manifest. Author & maintainer.

26PowerShellRepo

Quinta0/BostonHousing

Probability & Statistics coursework at USI: regression models predicting Boston-area housing prices.

JupyterRepo

Experience

End-to-end IT infrastructure for private and business clients in Ticino.

  • Delivered and maintained 4 production servers at 90%+ uptime using containerisation, IaC, and automated monitoring, all without managed hosting.
  • Eliminated public exposure across all client servers by routing every external entry-point through Cloudflare Tunnels and Pangolin/Traefik: zero open ports, DNSSEC enforced, split-DNS via AdGuard Home.
  • Pangolin + Traefik reverse proxy with Authelia SSO, automatic TLS, and Newt tunnelling.
  • Fail2Ban + Crowdsec intrusion detection; UFW + iptables firewall rules across all nodes.
  • Reduced storage recovery time to under 30 minutes with ZFS snapshots on the TrueNAS RAID 10 array and automated rsync offsite backups across all storage nodes.
  • Music pipeline: Lidarr → Prowlarr → Beets → Navidrome + Listenbrainz scrobbling + Symfonium/Explo mobile.
  • Windows Server: Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, Group Policy, Disaster Recovery planning.
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Education

Ongoing bachelor’s focusing on rigorous theory and quantitative methods.

  • Microeconomics: consumer and producer theory, market structures (perfect competition, oligopoly, monopoly), welfare economics, externalities.
  • Macroeconomics: GDP and growth models, IS-LM, monetary and fiscal policy, open economy models, inflation and unemployment dynamics.
  • Game Theory: Nash equilibrium, dominant strategies, extensive and normal form games, mechanism design, auction theory, repeated games.
  • Quantitative Finance & Statistics: probability theory, statistical inference, regression analysis, time series, financial modelling, portfolio theory basics.
  • Accounting, Statistics, and Quantitative Methods for economic analysis.
Game TheoryMicroeconomicsMacroeconomicsQuantitative FinanceStatisticsFinancial ModellingIS-LMNash Equilibrium

Two years of rigorous computer science foundations before transitioning to Economics.

  • Software Engineering: agile methodologies, requirements engineering, UML modelling, design patterns, and testing practices.
  • Data Structures & Algorithms: complexity analysis (Big-O), arrays, linked lists, trees, graphs, and sorting and searching algorithms.
  • Object-Oriented Programming: Java and C++ with inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation, and SOLID principles.
  • Web Development: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript fundamentals with introductory full-stack concepts.
  • Discrete mathematics, logic, and formal reasoning for computer science.
JavaC++AlgorithmsData StructuresOOPAgileSoftware EngineeringWeb Dev

Swiss dual-track qualification combining the academic Maturità with a commercial AFC diploma. Graduated above average in both tracks.

  • Economics & Business: microeconomic principles, business organisation, entrepreneurship, and market dynamics.
  • Accounting & Finance: double-entry bookkeeping, financial statements, cost accounting, and Swiss business law.
  • Mathematics & Statistics: algebra, calculus foundations, probability, and descriptive statistics.
  • Languages: Italian (native instruction), German, English, and French; professional writing and communication.
  • Maturità Cantonale: 4.5 / 6 · AFC Economics: 5 / 6. Above average in both tracks.
Maturità 4.5/6AFC 5/6AccountingBusiness LawMathematicsEconomicsMultilingual
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Languages
Italian
Native · C2
English
Fluent · C2
German
Conversational · B1-B2
Spanish
Basic · A1
Norwegian
Basic · A1

Ready to
collaborate?

Whether you need server infrastructure, network architecture, a self-hosted media stack, or a Junior SysAdmin, let’s build something reliable together.

0pietroquintavalle0@gmail.comGitHub ↗LinkedIn ↗