laptop_macDave's Desk / what's on it right now
A place to capture
what I'm into.
AI as a hobby. Things I'm building. Curiosity without a business case. 30+ years of IT context behind all of it.
Dave Walker
IT professional → AI hobbyist
radio_button_checkedCurrently active
Experimenting with AI
Building this site. Testing prompts. Breaking things to see what happens.
infoQuick facts
AI Lab — What I'm Using
AI Tools
Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude — daily experimentation
Vibe Coding
Building UIs with AI assistance — no CS degree required
Prompt Design
Finding patterns that consistently produce useful results
Writing with AI
Research, drafting, editing — AI as a thinking partner
Microsoft Copilot
M365 + Copilot — where enterprise IT meets AI
Astro
This very site — learning by actually shipping something
Exploring vs Building
travel_exploreWhat I'm exploring
Understanding AI from the inside out — not to build products with it, but to understand how it actually works in practice.
- How AI tools think — and where they confidently get it wrong
- Microsoft Copilot in real M365 environments vs. the marketing
- Prompting patterns that hold up across different models
- AI for research, ideation, and getting unstuck
- What 'AI literacy' actually means for people who aren't developers
constructionWhat I'm building
Making things with AI assistance — not always useful things, but real things that exist because I tried to build them.
- This site — designed and built with Astro and AI pair-programming
- Small tools and interfaces through vibe coding sessions
- UI experiments: what AI gets right vs. what it needs correcting on
- Personal knowledge systems and note capture structures
- Projects I start purely to see how far AI can carry the workload
The IT Context
The enterprise stack behind the AI curiosity — not a resume, just context.
Microsoft 365
Exchange, Teams, SharePoint, licensing at scale
Azure
Identity, cloud services, hybrid infrastructure
Microsoft Intune
Endpoint lifecycle: Windows, macOS, iOS, Android
Identity & Access
Azure AD, MFA, conditional access, SSO
Security & Compliance
NIST, PCI alignment, endpoint protection, data governance
Windows Server
Hybrid environments, on-prem to cloud modernization
IT Service Management
FreshService, first-response, 98% satisfaction across 250+ employees
Automation
Patching, scripting, maintenance overhead reduction
A few questions
help_outlineWhat is Dave's Desk?
A personal site for capturing what I'm exploring, learning, and building — starting with AI as a hobby. Not a portfolio. Not a job board. Just things worth writing down.
help_outlineWhat do you actually do with AI?
Experiment, build small things, test prompts, debug what the AI got wrong. The goal is understanding how it works in practice — not deploying it for a business case.
help_outlineWhat's the IT background?
IT Support → IT Manager → Cloud Administrator/Analyst. Deep in Microsoft enterprise: M365, Azure, Intune, endpoint lifecycle, IAM, and security compliance (NIST, PCI). That foundation is what makes AI experimentation interesting — I know what good tooling looks like.
help_outlineWhy make this public?
Partly to build something real. Partly because putting things in a format someone else could read forces clearer thinking. And partly because AI-as-a-hobby is more interesting than it sounds.
The trail here
Support
IT Support Specialist
Day-to-day operations, first-response troubleshooting, and infrastructure basics. The foundation — learning by doing across every type of problem that lands on a helpdesk.
Leadership
IT Support Manager
Scaled IT operations to support rapid company growth from 25 to 250+ employees while holding a 98% satisfaction rate. Built process from scratch — FreshService, performance metrics, vendor management, asset tracking.
Cloud
Cloud Administrator & IT Analyst
Enterprise M365 and Azure operations, Intune endpoint lifecycle across Windows/macOS/iOS/Android, Azure AD identity and conditional access, security alignment with NIST and PCI standards.
Now
AI as a hobby
Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, vibe coding — taking the practical problem-solving instinct from enterprise IT and pointing it at something genuinely interesting on its own terms.
More to Come
Expanding soonAI & Experimentation
Active topic — where this all started
Making & Tinkering
Electronics, small builds, home projects
Reading & Research
What I'm reading and what stuck
Getting Outside
Hiking, exploring, getting away from screens