About

About Me

Hey — I’m Daniel Lightfoot. I’m an IT pro, builder, tinkerer, part-time car nerd, and full-time problem solver. I've been in this game since I was 15, and I’ve never stopped chasing down weird bugs, building smarter systems, or pushing both cars and code to their limits.

I want to build things that make people’s lives easier — and help others level up along the way.

My Background

I started in a small-town repair shop fixing dusty desktops and figuring out why people’s printers wouldn’t work. That hands-on foundation taught me the importance of understanding the details — something that still drives how I work today. Over the years, I’ve taken on roles in systems administration, cloud engineering, security operations, and automation — always learning, always building.

What I Do Now

These days, I wear a lot of hats:
- Automating workflows with Python, PowerShell, and Bash
- Managing infrastructure across AWS, Unraid, and on-prem systems
- Building real-time dashboards for visibility and incident response
- Writing custom Discord bots, Flask web apps, and Slack automations
- Running New Relic, Sumo Logic, and other observability tools
- Digging into security posture, incident response, and vulnerability remediation

Whether I’m responding to a Sev1 incident or writing a script to help the team breathe easier, I stay calm under pressure and focused on the outcome.

Stuff I've Built

I’m always working on something — a few favorites:

• 🔊 Discord AI Bot: A music-playing bot that integrates with Plex, OpenAI, YouTube, and more. Handles queueing, tagging, TTS, and image generation — all running in Docker.
• 🎮 "Only Dan" Streaming Site: My own personal streaming platform, built with Flask, SQLAlchemy, Socket.IO, and Tailwind, featuring live chat, theme toggles, dark mode, and real-time controls.
• 🚨 Slack + ServiceNow Change Automation: Slack bot that pulls CHG data from ServiceNow, validates Jira tickets, sends approvals, and updates the Home tab dashboard — fully automated.
• 📊 New Relic Dashboards: Built and tuned dashboards for EBS latency, EC2 health, replication lag, and memory pressure across critical infrastructure — using NRQL and custom metadata filters.
• 🔧 Home Lab Automation: My home lab runs on Unraid, with Dockerized apps, CI/CD pipelines, scheduled vulnerability scans, and custom security dashboards — all tied into Discord for real-time alerting.
• 🛠️ IT Automation Toolkit: A growing suite of PowerShell scripts for Active Directory lookups, bulk user audits, log parsing, and change tracking — tools I’ve built and shared with my team to reduce manual overhead.
• 🔍 Confluence Runbook Extractor: Python script that crawls Confluence pages, extracts roles like Business Owner and Technical Lead, and compiles everything into a CSV — perfect for compliance and audits.
• 🚘 350Z Drift Tuner Logger: Work-in-progress logger for my Nissan 350Z, built with Python to capture sensor data, assist with tuning, and maybe one day use AI to analyze drift sessions.

Tools I Use

Here’s some of the tech I live in daily:

• 💻 Coding: VSCode, PyCharm, Sublime Text
• 🐍 Languages: Python, PowerShell, Bash, JavaScript
• 🐳 Containers: Docker, Docker Compose, Unraid
• ☁️ Cloud: AWS (Lambda, EC2, S3, CloudWatch), GitLab CI/CD
• 🔧 Infra/Security: Home Assistant, CrowdSec, Falco, ClamAV
• 📈 Observability: New Relic, Sumo Logic, Grafana
• 📄 Docs & APIs: Confluence, ServiceNow, Jira API, Slack SDK
• 🛜 Networking: pfSense, AsusWRT, Smokeping
• 🎮 Fun: Plex, Gamescope, Proton GE, Tailscale

My Approach

I’m the kind of person who believes in doing the work right — documenting as I go, writing scripts instead of repeating myself, and helping others learn along the way. I’m obsessed with learning, building systems that scale, and keeping things secure without slowing people down.

I don’t just work in tech — I live it. I’ve built personal tooling to monitor my home network, detect anomalies, log security events, and even notify me when weird stuff happens on my Discord server or NVR.

Off the Clock

When I’m not working, I’m probably: - Ripping up backroads in my Z
- Playing or building with music gear
- Fishing and spending time with my mom
- Writing automation for problems no one asked me to solve
- Planning a trip or tinkering with my Unraid setup

Let's Talk

I believe tech is about people, not just machines. If you want to talk shop, collaborate on a project, or just shoot the breeze about fast cars and smart code, hit me up: