About Jake Foster

I’m Jake Foster — a Jersey-based technology leader, infrastructure architect and CTO. I spend most of my working life around enterprise infrastructure, cloud, storage, resilience and the practical decisions that determine whether technology remains useful after the project plan has finished.

I’m Director and Chief Technology Officer at Prosperity 24/7, a business and technology consulting firm in the Channel Islands. I’ve worked in technology for more than two decades, from hands-on infrastructure and troubleshooting through to architecture, consultancy and technical leadership.

This site is the less corporate version of that experience: the things I’ve learned, the technologies I’m testing, the decisions I think are worth explaining, and the occasional rabbit hole involving home labs, cars, LEGO or Disney.

What I work on

Most of my professional work sits where architecture meets operations. The interesting question is rarely whether a product has a particular feature; it’s whether the whole platform will perform, recover, remain secure, fit the organisation and still be supportable several years later.

Experience without turning this into a CV

I’m still a hands-on technologist. I like being close enough to the detail to challenge an architecture, understand why something has failed and know when a design is becoming more complicated than the problem it is supposed to solve.

Certifications are useful, but the valuable bit starts afterwards: applying the technology to real estates, working through failure modes, dealing with upgrades, constraints, budgets and supportability, and finding out which assumptions survive contact with production.

How I think about technology

I’m not especially interested in technology for technology’s sake. I’m interested in what it lets an organisation do, how safely it can do it, and what happens when something goes wrong.

Technology in Jersey

Being based in Jersey adds a useful perspective to infrastructure and cloud architecture. The Island has excellent connectivity and a sophisticated regulated economy, but it is also a small jurisdiction where resilience, off-Island dependencies, skills and supplier choices matter in very practical ways.

Why I write isageek

Useful technical knowledge has a habit of disappearing into project notes, Teams chats, vendor calls and conversations that nobody will remember six months later. isageek is where I turn some of that into something more durable.

I’m not trying to make every article sound like a white paper. The aim is practical, technically grounded writing with enough personality left in it to sound like a person actually wrote it. Some posts are deep dives, some are fixes, some are opinions, and some are simply me documenting a useful answer before I forget it.

Home lab & automation

My curiosity doesn’t stop when the working day does. I run an Unraid-based home lab where I can experiment with storage, Docker, virtual machines, backup tools, dashboards and automation without needing a change window or a project code.

Because apparently this page needed a shell

This bit serves absolutely no SEO purpose. It exists because a personal technology site should be allowed to be a little bit unnecessary.

location: jersey
role: cto
fuel: tea
preferred_car_state: roof_down
backup_strategy: restore_it_or_it_doesnt_count
current_problem: probably_dns

Outside work

Technology is a large part of my life, but it is definitely not all of it. A few deliberately non-enterprise things are very effective at resetting the brain.

The Garage

S2000 “Spec Card”

Not a dyno sheet — more of a vibe check. I keep it simple: thoughtful upgrades, tidy maintenance and maximum smiles-per-mile.

• Platform: Honda S2000
• Theme: OEM+ / driver-focused
• Focus: reliability, feel and fun
• Best mode: roof down, clear roads

It’s my reset button: no alerts, no dashboards and nothing to troubleshoot except the next corner.

Car articles →

Escaping into the Disney bubble

Every so often the best way to recharge is not another gadget, project or technical rabbit hole — it is stepping away from all of it. For me, Walt Disney World does that particularly well.

EPCOT’s World Showcase is usually where I end up. I’m quite happy wandering around the lagoon without much of a plan, looking at the detail and deciding which country to eat in next. There is also something I appreciate professionally about Disney: an enormous amount of engineering and operational complexity sits underneath an experience designed to feel effortless.

Why I build LEGO

LEGO is almost the opposite of a normal day in technology. There is one instruction, one piece and one small problem at a time. It is calm, deliberate and surprisingly effective at switching off the part of my brain that wants to optimise everything.

I also like the design lesson in it. Complex things usually emerge from lots of small decisions being made consistently — which is as true of a good infrastructure platform as it is of a good LEGO set.

And unlike most technology projects, there is usually a very clear point where you can look at it and say: finished.

Connect

If you want to talk about infrastructure strategy, Azure, enterprise storage, backup and disaster recovery, automation, technology in Jersey, home labs, S2000s, LEGO or Disney, you can find me on LinkedIn.

Otherwise, start with the latest isageek articles and follow whichever rabbit hole looks useful.