I've spent 25+ years on the operations side of IT, as a sysadmin, support engineer, developer and team lead, and most of that time was spent being the person who gets called when production breaks. These days I do 2nd/3rd-line application support for business-critical e-commerce, and I'm deliberately moving into SRE / DevOps: I want to spend less time fixing the same incident twice and more time building systems that don't need it.
- 🔎 At work: root-cause analysis in OpenSearch and Grafana, finding the patterns in recurring incidents and working with developers on permanent fixes, giving the SRE team feedback that helps tune alerts, and automating support toil with Bash and Python, all kept in Git.
- 🧪 My SRE lab: I run a small fleet of my own (a cloud VPS plus a homelab) to practise what I'm learning: OpenTelemetry → VictoriaMetrics / OpenSearch → Grafana alerting, Docker, automated restic backups, CI with GitHub Actions, and monitoring config generated from code. When something breaks, I write the postmortem.
- 🤖 AI in operations: I use Claude Code and MCP integrations for log analysis, investigations and runbooks, at work and at home.
- 📚 Background: Windows and Linux, WebLogic/JBoss, Oracle/PostgreSQL, SAP Hybris, AWS, Akamai, and a stint at Microsoft Premier support.
| Project | The problem it solves |
|---|---|
| thock-wayland-addon | Thock, an app that plays keyboard click sounds, only worked on X11. This makes it work on Wayland: a small, locked-down system service reads the key presses, so the app itself never needs access to the keyboard |
| nextcloud-passwords-manager | A desktop app for my self-hosted password manager (Nextcloud Passwords) that keeps working offline |
| go-sendemail | Scripts and cron jobs need to e-mail a report or an alert, attachments included, without installing a mail client or building MIME by hand. One static binary that hands a standards-compliant message to the local mail relay |
Off the clock: composing and producing music 🎹