About
Brent Wilson
I build and run web platforms, and have done for about twenty years. Most of that time has gone into the parts that only show when they fail: hosting, caching, TLS, backups, the query that got slow, the plugin that stopped being maintained.
I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, and live here now. I have also lived in Dallas, Texas and Chattanooga, Tennessee. Huntsville is a town full of engineers, which turns out to be a good place to keep learning in.
What I do now
I work at Liquid Web as a WordPress Support Technician and QA specialist, on StellarWP's hosting customers. The work is escalated support — plugin conflicts, server-level performance, security hardening, caching doing the opposite of what someone expected — plus QA passes on releases before they reach anyone.
I also own and run BamaPolitics.com, which covers Alabama politics. I built the stack it runs on: a hardened LEMP server behind Cloudflare, custom WordPress plugins for election results and voter guides, and the live coverage that runs on election nights. It has grown to around 60,000 indexed pages, and on a busy election night it serves upwards of 100,000 people.
Before that
I started MustangEvolution.com in 2003, out of high school, and ran it for nine years. It grew to roughly 50,000 registered members and its own newsroom, and was written up by Mustang Monthly, CNN, Jalopnik, Autoblog, Digg and Reddit along the way. I sold it in 2012.
For ten years after that I was COO at Group Net, running operations and infrastructure for eight community platforms — ChristianForums, ReligiousForums, BaptistBoard and others — at around five million pageviews a month, with a team of a dozen or so moderators and administrators.
Away from the keyboard
I follow the Atlanta Braves, the Atlanta Falcons and Alabama athletics, and I have been around animals my whole life. At home I run an Unraid server with more than 150TB of storage, and I keep finding reasons to add self-hosted services to it. Some of the power for that comes off my own solar.