Every site starts with a hello-world. Mine is no different, except I've been dreading writing it for about three months.
I'm the kind of person who builds things to avoid talking about the things I build. I spent two weekends writing a custom log parser before I admitted I could have used jq. I have four half-finished Kubernetes operators in various states of decay. I once rewrote a 40-line bash script in Go because I thought it would be "more maintainable" — it was not more maintainable.
That's the honest picture. I'm a mechanic, not an architect. I fix things, I build things, I break things, and occasionally I build something that actually holds up under real pressure.
What this site is
This is a place for notes. Not tutorials with seven diagrams and an affiliate disclaimer. Not a "deep dive" that turns out to be three paragraphs and a table of contents. Just notes — the kind of thing I'd send to a colleague who asked "how does that work?" or "why did you do it that way?"
Some posts will be long. Most will be short. A few will be wrong, and I'll update them when I figure that out. I've got a now page for what I'm currently working on, a projects section for things that survived contact with production, and a blog for everything else.
What I actually do
I work on infrastructure and platform tooling. Clusters, pipelines, deployments, monitoring — the layer below the application that everyone forgets about until it breaks at 2am. I've been doing some version of this for about eight years, which means I've been paged at 2am for about eight years.
I started out as a sysadmin who learned to write scripts because I was tired of doing the same thing twice. Then the scripts became services. Then the services became platforms. Somewhere in there I started calling myself a software engineer, though I still think of the work as closer to plumbing than artistry.
Why now
I've been collecting notes in private notebooks for years — Obsidian vaults, text files, random gists. I keep finding the same patterns: a debugging technique I rediscovered, a tool I forgot I liked, a lesson I had to re-learn. Writing things in public is partly a forcing function for clarity, and partly a way to stop losing the same hour to the same problem.
If something here helps you, that's a bonus. The primary reader is me-in-six-months who has definitely forgotten how this worked.
Welcome to the shop.