About Me

The Short Version

I've been in IT for 13 years — 10 of those at MSPs, 6 in the cloud. Most of my career has been spent managing infrastructure on "someone else's computer" and explaining to people why that's not as reassuring as it sounds.

These days I work as an AWS Solutions Architect, which is a fancy way of saying I draw diagrams, argue about IAM policies, and occasionally write code that makes it to production. I'm passionate about all things technology, and I have an unhealthy persistence when it comes to proving an idea *could* work — even if "production ready" remains a distant aspiration.

What I Actually Do

The honest answer? It depends. Those who know me will understand.

But broadly speaking:

• Cloud Architecture: Designing systems that don't fall over when someone sneezes, and cost less than a second mortgage.
• AI Tinkering: Building things with LLMs and generative AI — sometimes useful, sometimes just to see if I can.
• Automation: Making repetitive tasks go away so I can focus on more interesting problems.

Opinions Held Strongly

Terraform modules aren't multi-cloud. There, I said it. You still need to write — or steal, or borrow — provider-specific modules for each cloud, manage them separately, and deal with state management that remains a colossal pain. The "write once, deploy anywhere" dream is marketing. Fight me.

Mistakes I've Made

In the spirit of this blog's "failures first" philosophy, here's one I'm willing to admit publicly:

I once built a QnA bot to answer questions about company policies. Lovely bit of work. I also included some "easter eggs" — inside jokes about colleagues, the kind of thing that's hilarious internally and horrifying externally. Then I forgot to decommission it. The OpenSearch cluster sat there, quietly indexing nothing useful, until I got a bill for four grand.

Lessons learned: always set billing alerts, always tag your resources, and maybe don't embed workplace banter into production systems.

Why This Blog?

I learn by doing, and I retain things by writing them down. This site exists because:

• Writing forces me to actually understand what I think I know.
• Future me will thank present me when I hit the same problem in six months.
• Sometimes the unfiltered version is more useful than the one that went through marketing.
• And i was bored one weekend.

Contact

I'd rather not be contacted by email — nothing personal, I just have enough unread messages to last several lifetimes. That said, I'm always happy to connect on LinkedIn if you want to talk tech. Keep it professional, keep it interesting, and we'll get along fine.

Certifications

I find cert-flashing mildly irritating, but if there's anywhere to display proof that I can pass exams under pressure and remember things long enough to tick boxes, it's probably here. So here they are — my digital scout badges:

Yes, I sat through all of these. Yes, some of them were multiple attempts. No, I won't tell you which ones.