Lab Notes & Field Reports

Infrastructure, identity, & the automation in between.

Practical patterns from 8+ years building IAM, endpoint security, and cloud infrastructure at companies like Figma, Headway, and Sounders FC. No theory — just what actually works in production.

→ This is the technical side of alexdavenport.dev. For my portfolio, resume, and contact info, head there.

Featured

Automation 6 min

TrailFix: Browser-Based GPS Post-Processing Without the $1,000 Upgrade

How I built a client-side GPS post-processor that gets sub-meter accuracy from a Bad Elf Flex Mini Standard — using position averaging, Kalman smoothing, and free NOAA CORS data.
IAM 12 min

Building Bulletproof Joiner/Mover/Leaver Automation with Okta Workflows

How I built HRIS-driven identity lifecycle automation at scale — from SCIM provisioning to full session revocation on offboarding. Includes an open-source lab you can run locally.
Endpoint 7 min

Zero Trust BYOD on macOS Without Owning the Device

Designing a BYOD enrollment path that enforces device posture — OS version, disk encryption, screen lock — without requiring full MDM ownership. The Headway approach.

All Posts

Automation 6 min

TrailFix: Browser-Based GPS Post-Processing Without the $1,000 Upgrade

How I built a client-side GPS post-processor that gets sub-meter accuracy from a Bad Elf Flex Mini Standard — using position averaging, Kalman smoothing, and free NOAA CORS data.
Automation 5 min

Building an Alumni Data Enrichment Pipeline in Python

How I built a Python pipeline that cross-references alumni records against public APIs to enrich contact data, validate emails, and flag stale records — turning a messy spreadsheet into actionable data.
IAM 12 min

Building Bulletproof Joiner/Mover/Leaver Automation with Okta Workflows

How I built HRIS-driven identity lifecycle automation at scale — from SCIM provisioning to full session revocation on offboarding. Includes an open-source lab you can run locally.
Endpoint 7 min

Zero Trust BYOD on macOS Without Owning the Device

Designing a BYOD enrollment path that enforces device posture — OS version, disk encryption, screen lock — without requiring full MDM ownership. The Headway approach.
Security 8 min

EDR Modernization: Replacing Legacy AV with Enterprise-Grade Detection

A practical playbook for migrating from legacy antivirus to modern EDR — scoping, vendor evaluation, phased rollout, and the metrics that prove it's working.
Infrastructure 10 min

Hybrid Active Directory with Real Disaster Recovery

Planning hybrid AD architecture across AWS and on-premises DCs with actual disaster recovery — not just a diagram that says 'failover' with an arrow.
IAM 6 min

Identity Health Dashboards: What to Monitor and Why

The lightweight identity health dashboards I build to maintain audit readiness and catch IAM drift before it becomes a compliance finding.