About
Lone Star Specialist is a Texas-based IT contracting practice, run by Kevin Kirk. It's where I take on focused contract work for teams that need a senior hand for a set window — bounded engagements I can scope, own, and close out cleanly.
I'm hands-on with the stack most mid-market IT shops actually run. Four years across RHEL and Windows servers, VMware and Nutanix clusters (nutanix.com), Cisco switching (cisco.com) and firewalls, Rubrik backup, NetApp storage, and Splunk SIEM (splunk.com). I also run Software House C·CURE 9000 for access control and Axis IP video (axis.com) for surveillance. I've logged 4,000+ engineering hours in production environments. That work includes DoD STIG hardening for federal and regulated systems, per disa.mil and NIST 800-53 mappings. I hold 7 active certs across systems, networking, virtualization, and security.
On the web side, I ship modern marketing sites and small web apps. The stack is Astro, Tailwind, and TypeScript — deployed to cloudflare.com Pages and Workers, with KV or D1 for storage and the source kept in github.com repos. This site and its admin console were both built that way.
What you get: someone who can drop into a runbook, ship a migration, harden a fleet, stand up SIEM coverage, build the marketing site, or cover an admin gap — without a six-week ramp-up.
Background
More on the practice
Lone Star Specialist is a Texas-based IT contracting practice owned and operated by Kevin Kirk — a senior IT professional with 4+ years of production infrastructure work and 7 active certifications across systems administration, networking, virtualization, and security.
The published method centers on three principles: write the runbook before you make the change, validate against named gates, and leave deliverables in the client's repository with comments that survive after the engagement closes. Compliance work follows the DISA STIG library on public.cyber.mil and NIST 800-53 control mappings published by csrc.nist.gov.
For prospective clients: the fastest path to a fit assessment is the contact form on the homepage. Engagements are scoped as bounded project windows with clear start and end dates.