Whereas my career in software development began in the front-end, and evolved into full-stack development, this most recent chapter of my career has been largely focused on infrastructure, automation, developer-platforms, and observability. I have always enjoyed building the application itself, but infrastructure is a different kind of fun because you get to zoom out and think about systems. How the various parts interact. How to scale the application. How to most effectively develop and deploy it. How to make it secure and resilient. How to understand its performance at all levels of the stack.

This last decade has been an incredible time to work in infrastructure as we’ve seen the rise of cloud computing and seemingly infinite scale, and simultaneously the ability to create bare-metal micro-cloud clusters on little tiny embedded processors like Raspberry Pis. If one chooses their tools carefully, they can even deploy to both worlds with many of the same freely available tools and technologies.

I have, at my last few gigs enjoyed spinning up and managing multiple application stacks across multiple accounts in AWS. I am a big fan of the HashiStack, and have used Terraform, Vault, Consul both in AWS via HashiCorp’s Cloud Platform, and in my own home lab using the free versions. When I am afforded the opportunity (which I am at home), Nomad is my favorite orchestrator.

Grafana Cloud is my go-to for all things observability, and Redpanda for all data replication, stream-processing, and event-sourcing needs.