operator file
About
I'm a senior engineering leader at Amazon Web Services, in Enterprise Support — the people who stand behind the world's largest cloud customers when it matters most. I came up through that world and now lead in it, and it shaped how I think about engineering: reliability is a discipline, not a feature. Underneath the leadership sit 26 years of writing software and running Linux — long enough to have racked servers when that was the only option, and to genuinely appreciate that it no longer is.
Leading engineering teams is my day job, and I care about it deeply: growing engineers, raising the bar on operational excellence, and keeping organizations honest about what their systems actually do. But I never stopped building. My homelab is a small datacenter run entirely as code — and lately it's become the substrate for something more interesting: a fleet of AI agents that my whole family actually uses.
I write about the journey — wins, failures, and postmortems included — in the writing section. When I'm not at a keyboard, I'm on the ice playing hockey or spending time with my family.
things i believe
- Git is the source of truth. If it isn’t in the repo, it doesn’t exist.
- Boring tools, deliberately chosen, beat exciting tools accumulated by accident.
- Every deploy should be intentional and auditable. No magic, no drift.
- Backups you haven’t restored are hopes, not backups.
- Simplicity is a hard constraint, not a nice-to-have. Overengineering is a failure mode.
- Show receipts. Claims about systems should be verifiable by looking at them.
- The best engineers never stop being beginners — that’s what “Always Day 1” means to me.