douglas wood

Douglas Wood

I'm a student who learns networking by building it. Right now that means a Raspberry Pi in my apartment filtering every DNS lookup my devices make.

Computer Information Systems at Texas State University. Looking for IT and cybersecurity internships.

See what I've built
live from my pi-hole connecting…
– lookups, last 24h
– blocked
– ads & trackers

Numbers update every few minutes, straight from the Pi. Only totals are shown here, never the sites I visit.

Projects

Network-wide ad blocker on a Raspberry Pi 2

Raspberry Pi OS Lite, Pi-hole, Tailscale, Linux

I turned an old Raspberry Pi 2 into a DNS server that blocks ads and trackers for my phone wherever I am, on a building network I don't control. Getting there meant solving four problems, in this order:

  1. The Pi booted to a black screen

    The board was running but showed no picture. I confirmed Linux was alive by toggling Caps Lock on a USB keyboard, traced the problem to the graphics driver handoff, and fixed it by disabling the KMS overlay in config.txt.

  2. The apartment network isolates devices

    My laptop and phone couldn't reach the Pi on the building Wi-Fi. Instead of a personal router the lease might not allow, I put the Pi and my devices on a Tailscale mesh network and routed DNS through the Pi's private address.

  3. Pi-hole ignored requests from the VPN

    Queries arrived on the Tailscale interface and were dropped. I changed Pi-hole's listening mode so it answers on every interface, which is safe because only my own devices can reach it.

  4. The building blocks outside DNS servers

    Lookups reached the Pi but never got answers. Testing with dig showed queries to public resolvers timed out while the building's own resolver worked, so I pointed Pi-hole's upstream at the building's DNS.

Result: ad and tracker blocking on my phone at home, on campus and on cellular data, with a dashboard showing every domain my devices contact.

Miniature ERP system for a semiconductor manufacturer

Team project built in Python, Tkinter and SQLite

  • Desktop app covering inventory, production, point of sale, payroll and reporting.
  • Separated UI, service and repository layers, so no screen touches the database directly and all validation and business rules run in the service layer.
  • Finalized prompts across a multi-model workflow, running team drafts through Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini and synthesizing the outputs over 20+ iterations.
  • Served as system tester: wrote test scenarios, ran the app against them and used Claude Code to triage defects, including a SQLite transaction isolation bug, a dashboard memory leak and a screen that bypassed the service layer.

NBA player statistics analysis

Data mining final project in R and RStudio

  • Analyzed a full season of NBA player stats to test whether offensive or defensive statistics better predict player efficiency.
  • Applied multiple linear regression, principal component regression, classification trees, naive Bayes and k-means clustering.
  • Led the analysis, debugged teammates' R code and consolidated the group's work into a single R Markdown report.

Synthetic data generator

A Python program that generates synthetic CSV records from a delimited input file. It validates several delimiter formats, logs malformed lines with line numbers, and tracks used name combinations so every record is unique. Written without AI assistance.

Python, file I/O

This website

The HTML, CSS, JavaScript and stats script were written by Claude, an AI assistant. I set up and run everything underneath: nginx on the Pi, the deploy from GitHub, the Pi-hole API access and the cron job that refreshes the live numbers every five minutes.

nginx, Git, cron, Pi-hole API

SSH honeypot Planned

A fake SSH service that logs login attempts, so I can study what automated attacks try first.

Python, SQLite

Room sensor and badge station Planned

An Arduino reads temperature and RFID badge scans and reports to the Pi, which logs access attempts and graphs the room.

Arduino, serial, Python

Skills

Languages

  • Python
  • R
  • SQL

Databases

  • SQLite
  • Microsoft SQL Server (SSMS)
  • Query writing and relational table design

Data mining

  • RStudio and R Markdown
  • Regression, PCR, classification trees
  • Naive Bayes, k-means clustering

Networking

  • DNS and DHCP
  • VPN and mesh networks (Tailscale)
  • Troubleshooting with ping, dig, curl

Systems

  • Linux command line
  • Raspberry Pi, nginx, cron
  • Git-based deploys

Testing and AI tools

  • Test scenario design, defect triage
  • Claude Code
  • Prompt engineering, multi-model synthesis

Education

Texas State University

Computer Information Systems, McCoy College of Business

Coursework: data communications and network architecture, data mining, software development, databases

Certificates

  • Develop and Lead, McCoy College of Business (Spring 2025)
  • Workforce Readiness Essential Skills Training

Get in touch

I'm open to internships and entry-level roles in IT, networking and security.