About Jeremy

Who I Am

I’m Jeremy Heslop — a Jesus follower, husband to Carla, father of four, and a lifelong technologist. I run Omni Technology Professionals, an IT consulting company I founded in 2004. By day I help businesses with their technology. By night (and sometimes well past midnight), I’m building, breaking, and automating everything I can get my hands on.

What I’m Working On Now

These days I’m deep into:

• AI & Automation — Running local AI models on my own hardware, building AI assistants, and exploring how artificial intelligence can actually be useful for families and small businesses
• Self-Hosting Everything — My homelab runs on Proxmox with dozens of services: Home Assistant, Pi-hole, Nextcloud, media servers, monitoring, and more. If there’s a SaaS product, I’ve probably tried to self-host an alternative
• Home Automation — Smart home setups with Home Assistant, automated workflows with n8n, DNS-level ad blocking with Pi-hole
• Writing About It — This blog is where I share what I’ve learned, what broke, and what actually worked. Real experiences, honest takes, no fluff

The Tech Stack

My current homelab runs Proxmox VE with LXC containers and Docker, hosting services including Portainer, Coolify, Nextcloud, Linkwarden, Uptime Kuma, n8n, Ollama (local AI), Home Assistant, Pi-hole, and a full media stack. I’ve got a gaming PC with an RTX 4090 that doubles as an AI inference machine. The journey from a single Linux box to this setup is one of the stories I’m telling here.

---

My Story

The following is from the original version of this page, written back when this blog started. I’m keeping it because it’s where everything began.

Beginnings

If I had to pick something that got me to love technology and computers, it would have to be a tie between my Dad’s first computer a Centris 610, Vic 20 or my Atari. They caused me to explore and hack on hardware and software. I built my own MacOS BBS, my church’s website and played multiplayer Warcraft all while in high school. The most fun part was falling asleep to Objective C and Java books.

Getting into Technology

I had my first technology job as a junior in high school doing IT work for a local retail company. I created their website and kept their Windows PCs and NetWare server running. Before college, I became a web developer and designer for a local web company for two years. I introduced myself and them to IIS version of programming in htx/idc files before moving to ASP. I then spent four years working as a Unix/Linux system administrator for the State of MD all the while honing my skills in PHP/MySQL. Keeping up with the latest technologies was a significant component of the job by my boss (Thanks, Randy!) so I was always reading and learning.

An Entrepreneur is Born

My father-in-law gave me a book called Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki which changed how I looked at being an employee and I knew I needed to change the path where I was at. I wasn’t ready to start my own business, yet, but given the opportunity to work with a small local IT business again I jumped at the chance for change. I learned from this experience in so many ways, but overall I learned that if my boss could do it, I could! He let me go on April 1st, 2004 (April Fools? Not!) because he was moving on. I had to decide to continue my path of employment or start my own business. A dozen resumes and applications were all sent with zero response. That was my sign to start my own company. So on April 22, 2004 I started Omni Technology Professionals, Inc. and thus my quest began.

20+ Years of Running A Business

Looking back over 20+ years of running a business I have had quite the ride. Failing many times in the process I have learned so many things. Now I’m combining that experience with the latest in AI and automation — using the tools I write about here in my own business every day. I hope to continue to learn about entrepreneurship and working on my business instead of in my business.

---

Get In Touch

The best way to reach me is through the newsletter signup in the sidebar — replies go straight to my inbox. You can also find me on LinkedIn or GitHub.