These days I’m a site reliability engineer. Most of my career has gone into building and running Kubernetes platforms — clusters, service meshes, GitOps, and the observability stack that tells you when any of it is unhappy — usually defined in Terraform, and usually replacing something manual that used to take days. Lately I’ve been working on the harder version of that problem: running a platform inside someone else’s environment, on-prem or private cloud and sometimes air-gapped, where I can’t see the logs or reach the hosts. That changes the job. The software has to be installable by people who don’t work for me and diagnosable by operators I’ll never meet, which means a lot of time spent on incident response, and on turning security requirements into infrastructure code instead of a checklist someone signs. Most of what ends up on this blog comes out of that work, or out of whatever I’m running at home.
I live in southeast Michigan with my four wonderful kids. Outside of work I run, garden, and play guitar — somewhere between beginner and intermediate, and slowly working toward writing, recording and mixing a song of my own at home.