Ceau! I'm Robert — online as merox, a name I built from my own: me from Melcher, ro from Robert, x from an old alias where 0x39 is hex for 57, my birthday. It all started in 2006 — I was nine — with a Pentium 4 running Windows XP that I kept breaking, and a family friend who'd come reinstall it. I watched him closely enough to eventually do it myself, then never stopped pulling things apart to understand them.

By 2010 I was running private game servers — Metin2, CS 1.6, SA:MP — with a phpBB community built around them. That's where I first got serious about infrastructure: chasing uptime, understanding failure modes, keeping things running for people who depended on them.

Some eight years later, while I was studying Computer Science and still convinced I wasn't ready, Dacian — a close friend — dragged me out of bed to write my first CV, in Notepad, printed out just in case, and pushed me toward a sysadmin opening at Netex. I had the logic, not the vocabulary. It worked out. That story is on the blog →

From that first job I kept pushing: Linux administration, then CCNA to fill in the networking gaps I knew I had, which opened the door into cybersecurity — and eventually to HPC Sysadmin at Forvia. Outside of work I run a public homelab with Kubernetes and GitOps as a proving ground for whatever I'm currently learning. This blog is the notebook I keep along the way.

Away from the terminal I'm usually on the bike — a CUBE Reaction SLX, every ride on Strava. Rock and folk when the playlist gets to choose.