About

Hello there! 👋

My name is Jaan. I’m glad you are here, that means I’m doing something right.

Probably you’ve searched for something related to self-host here and there. Maybe you wanted to find an open-source alternative to serve your needs instead of paying tons and tons of ca$h monthly and growing your bills exponentially.

I would like to share with you some of my knowledge gathered with years of experience, so you could save time and money with my results.

On My site you will find, different tests, benchmarks, fuckups, and recommendations along with my way to grow myself and my hobbies.

What I Do

By profession, I’m a Localization Project Manager with 19 years in the localization industry — the last 13 as PM, running full-lifecycle, multi-TMS operations for global clients including Gen Digital, Avast, Avira, AVG, Zendesk, BlackBerry, and others. I own vendor and linguist relationships end to end: intake, budgeting, quality-tier assignment, delivery, and everything in between across up to 41 languages at once, spanning FIGS, Nordic, CEE, CJK, Indic, SEA, MENA, LATAM, and RTL locales. I also bring a technical mindset from my QA/automation background: comfortable scoping process-improvement and automation requests, and administering the TMS infrastructure that keeps translation delivery running smoothly.

You can find my full professional history on LinkedIn.

Experience

Project Manager — 13+ years, current role

• Run the full localization lifecycle for global clients (Gen Digital, Avast, Avira, AVG, Zendesk, BlackBerry, and others) across up to 41 languages simultaneously, spanning FIGS, Nordic, CEE, CJK, Indic, SEA, MENA, LATAM, and RTL locales, handling ~7–13 concurrent requests on a given day.
• Own an active vendor and linguist network of 100+ translators and reviewers (30+ engaged on a regular basis), including quality-tier assignment, TAT tracking, and job dispatch.
• Administer end-to-end TMS operations across WorldServer (daily XLIFF/SDLXLIFF export–import and QA checks), memoQ Standalone & Web (project setup, TM/TB maintenance, delivery), Phrase (intake, budgeting, kickoff, delivery), and XTM (2 yrs; CMS-to-portal intake, team assignment, export/import via internal memoQ servers).
• Analyze source files (DOC, XLS, PDF, PPTX, and others) for word counts, deadlines, and special instructions to scope budgets and schedules; prepare budgets and POs for linguists, including manual invoicing where not automated.
• Coordinate multimedia localization: SRT subtitle translation, voice-over script localization across multiple languages, and studio VO recording sessions with linguists.
• Handle DTP and format conversion across PPTX, PDF, and other file types, including OCR to reconstruct editable source content from non-editable files when needed.
• Some hands-on exposure to content and translation workflows within Adobe AEM (CMS).
• Track SLA adherence across all engagements, consistently meeting SLA targets across all vendors (99%+), and resolve delivery risks proactively in direct communication with clients and linguists.

QA Lead — 2.5 years

• Led QA and testing for Autodesk Civil 3D (2012–2014 releases), covering automation and manual testing with a team of ~50.
• Led testing for Zeptolab titles (Cut the Rope, Pudding Monsters) and related web projects, with a team of 10 plus translators.

QA Test Engineer — 3.5 years

• Performed software and localization testing for Adobe (Dreamweaver, BrowserLab), Symantec (NAV/NIS/N360), Skype (PC/Mobile), and Autodesk (Revit Architecture, Revit Structure).
• Conducted manual and localization QA across Latin, Cyrillic, and Asian-script builds.

That earlier company was later acquired by the one I work at now, marking 19 years of continuous, unbroken experience in the localization industry.

Skills

Localization Project Management · Vendor & Linguist Management · Budgeting & Cost Control · SLA & Quality-Tier Management · DTP & Format Conversion · Multilingual QA · Multimedia Localization (SRT / VO) · Cross-Functional Collaboration · Process-Improvement Scoping

PM Tools & TMS

WorldServer (RWS) · memoQ (Standalone & Web) · memsource → Phrase · XTM · Across · Trados / Passolo · Jira & custom portals · Confluence, Moodle

Languages

Russian · English · Estonian

Education

• Secondary Education, Tallinna Kesklinna Gümnaasium, Estonia
• Mainor High School — IT Specialist

19 years of hands-on industry experience; self-taught in IT infrastructure, systems administration, and web technologies (see below).

Beyond the Day Job

A closer look at the technical and personal side: infrastructure, tooling, and interests that don’t always fit on a resume — and honestly, this is where this site actually comes from.

Self-Hosted Infrastructure & Homelab

• Run a multi-node Proxmox homelab: a primary hypervisor with a small RAID array, plus a secondary node dedicated to Home Assistant and backups.
• Manage a mix of Docker-based services and VMs, including a TrueNAS instance for storage management and multiple OS environments (Windows, Debian, Ubuntu, CachyOS) for remote work.
• Administer hosts via Red Hat Cockpit; self-host a mail server on Mailcow and a web stack on NGINX, Nginx Proxy Manager, and Caddy (VPS-hosted).
• Run a broad Docker service stack: NetBird / WireGuard / OpenVPN, Dockhand / Portainer, Paperless-ngx, Immich, Seafile, Nextcloud, Audiobookshelf, and Home Assistant driving a range of IoT devices (smart plugs, lighting, sensors, weather and uptime monitoring, etc.).
• Built a Raspberry Pi monitoring stack (Grafana, Prometheus, Telegraf, InfluxDB, Uptime Kuma) and rely on a MikroTik/TP-Link network, with working knowledge of UniFi and Asus.

Web & CMS

• Built and maintain WordPress/WooCommerce sites for local businesses and personal event pages; e-commerce experience with Shopify.
• Comfortable with AI-assisted static site generation (Hugo, Astro) and Git-based workflows; earlier legacy exposure to Drupal and Joomla.
• Experience across web/hosting control panels: cPanel, Webmin/Virtualmin, aaPanel, Vesta, CyberPanel, DirectAdmin.
• Use ClickUp personally to manage content-production workflows, tracking photo and video ad shoots and freelance web projects.

AI Tools & Automation

• Daily user of AI assistants (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini) for research, automation, and workflow support — this site itself leans heavily on AI-assisted workflows.
• Run local LLMs via LM Studio (Gemma, Qwen) for offline experimentation, and explore agent-based automation (Claude, Hermes) for personal infrastructure.

Personal

Outside of work I’m into cars (snow drifting, car audio/multimedia tuning) and motorbikes, and I shoot travel and event videos for my personal/family collection. I also enjoy PC building and upgrading as a hobby, along with OS administration (physical dust cleaning, full software re-installs, hardware checkups, and thermal paste/pad replacement) for family and friends.

I hope the information you find here will help you in a way. Cheers.

Lifestyle, Hobby & Wealthiness. My way. ->