Who Am I?

My name is Erv Walter. I am in my late 40s. I live in Wisconsin, and I am a...

Father and Husband

Hands down, my most important endeavor is being father to my incredible teenage daughter and husband to my kick ass veterinarian wife.

Professional Software Developer

I have been a software developer at Epic since 1999, and it's been an incredible ride. I joined Epic when we were small, and I've gotten to enjoy our journey from mostly unknown underdog to the industry leader. I couldn't be more proud of what we've done and my part in it.

Amateur Software Developer

I love doing web development, and not just when I'm at work.

I created TrendWeight over 10 years ago, largely for my own benefit. But then I mentioned it to a couple other people on a weight loss forum, and over time it has gained a small little following. I have no interest in "beating the big boys", but I do enjoy tinkering with TrendWeight and knowing that it has helped a lot of people lose weight. I'm also in the process of rebuilding it from scratch since it is 10 year old tech. Watch for a series of articles coming soon on that project...

I am also a board game afficionado (see more below) and I built another web site to catalog my obsession. It pulls data from BoardGameGeek about my collection and calculates a bunch of stats about the games that I own. It was my first real React development many years ago and is also due for a technology refresh.

Board Game Collector

I have an absurd board game collection. I got into modern board games in late 2013 and quickly went way down the rabbit hole. Honestly, I have more games than we can play with any reasonable frequency, but I'm not getting rid of them. They have provided my wife and I with more than a thousand hours of enjoyment. Along the way, we turned our basement into a full blown game room. My acquisition of new games has slowed down over time (thankfully), but we still play games regularly--even games I picked up at the very beginning of the obsession.

General Technology Geek

I like gadgets. I buy gadgets. Too many gadgets. Sometimes they are even useful ;)

My basement includes what my wife refers to as "the data center" with way more tech than even a typical small business would reasonably need. Ceph is my storage platform of choice, though I also use TrueNAS Scale and Unraid as backup targets. My network is UniFi gear combined with a OPNsense firewall. I run a cluster of Proxmox virtual machine hosts, that in turn run a series of services that power our high tech home.

I've turned our home into a smart home using a mix of technologies, including Philips Hue smart light bulbs, Lutron Caseta smart switches, Amazon Echo smart speakers, Unifi Protect cameras, miscellaneous Z-Wave and ZigBee sensors, all unified via Home Assistant running on a VM in the previously mentioned "data center".