About
Laid off. Off-grid. Writing it down.
I'm Joshua Bryan. For about ten years I was a support engineer at Ring, from the startup days through the Amazon years. In 2026 that ended. I live on about five acres in Cochise County, Arizona, with no utility connection, building a container home under an owner-builder permit and figuring out how to make a technical living from here.
What this site is for
Most writing about off-grid living is about the living. Most writing about remote income assumes you have a fiber line and a coffee shop. This site is the overlap: the power and connectivity it takes to hold a technical job or run a small business from a place with neither, the build itself, and the specific businesses I run to pay for it.
The rule is simple. Everything here about my own setup is something I have actually done. Where I have not confirmed a number, it is marked [VERIFY] instead of guessed. External facts link to a source. No subscriber counts, no revenue screenshots, no milestones I cannot show.
How I got here
2016
Joined Ring as a support engineer
Ring was still a startup. I came in on the support engineering side, which at a hardware company means the place where customer problems, firmware, networking and the backend all collide.
2018
Amazon acquired Ring
The job got bigger. Over the following years I was promoted from Support Engineer I through IV and worked executive escalations, DevOps support, on-call rotations and outage communications, with Splunk, Tableau, Redshift and AWS as the daily toolset. I was also on a team that built in-app Wi-Fi and network self-diagnostics so customers could find their own connectivity problems.
2022
Built the solar array
Ground-mount array on the Cochise County property, permitted as its own accessory structure. It still runs the place: two EG4 inverters in parallel, server-rack LiFePO4 batteries, Solar Assistant for monitoring.
2026
Laid off
After about ten years, the role ended in a layoff. The land and the power system were already here. The question stopped being hypothetical: can you earn a technical living from five acres with no grid?
Now
Building, and writing it down
An owner-built container home going up under the county owner-builder permit, a handful of small businesses that run from anywhere, and this site as the record of both.
What I run
A PDF guide store for DJI pilots (RotorCards), a drone services company with my wife (Stronghold Precision Aerials), a Part 107 study app (Flycensed), a vacant-parcel data product for Arizona land investors (AZ Land List), a digital-twin tool for rural land (PlotNode) and an AI agent substrate in closed alpha (IsoKron). Each one is described honestly, with a live link, on the projects page. The site itself is operated by Stormhaven Enterprises LLC.
Reach me
Corrections, questions about the setup, or notes from your own build are all welcome.