I'm Moshe Lichaa. With no degree and no formal training, I taught myself networking, virtualization, and Linux by building a real homelab from the ground up — and I do hands-on IT for a community organization. I use AI as a tool to learn faster and get unstuck, never as a replacement for understanding what I build.
For the last year I've been on-site IT for a 50+ person community organization, where I physically built out their new network and keep things running day to day. Almost everything I know, I taught myself — mostly by building and running my own infrastructure at home.
I use AI deliberately: when I hit a problem I genuinely can't crack on my own, I use it to get unstuck — and I always make sure I understand the fix, so I keep getting sharper instead of dependent. What I care about most is using technology to help mission-driven organizations actually work.
A homelab I designed, configured, and run entirely myself — 28+ containerized services across three nodes, with networked storage, a firewall, VPN access, and network-wide DNS filtering. This is where I taught myself most of what I know.
A complete mail server on my own domain — I set up the firewall, DNS, authentication, and delivery, using AI to get unstuck on the parts that were new to me. Lands in the inbox, not spam.
Used AI to help build a CRM and automation system for a small art-education studio — connecting registration forms, a contact database, and email so the team spends less time on admin and more with the kids.
For a 50+ person community organization, I physically installed and set up the network equipment and made sure everything worked — the hands-on half of a project the team configured remotely. I learned the same software myself on my own home network.
I didn't use AI at all when I started — I learned by searching, reading, and testing until things worked. Now I use it for the problems I genuinely can't solve on my own, and every time, I make myself understand the fix and remember how it worked. If you let AI think for you on everything, you stop building your own judgment. I'd rather use it to get unstuck and come out smarter — and that's how I'd help an organization use it too.