Platforms:#

Management Platforms & Cloud Providers#

Amazon Web Services (AWS)#

5 Years of Experience

Used heavily for production, security, and automation work. Strongest areas are IAM (administration and audit), EC2, ECS, SQS, DynamoDB, Bedrock, RDS, Route 53, VPC, and Textract.

Microsoft Azure#

2 Years of Experience

Roughly two years across client environments and personal projects. Most of that time was SQL, virtual machines, and containers. I can use Azure when needed, but I usually prefer not to.

VMware vSphere#

2 Years of Experience

Used extensively in client and prospect environments in prior roles. Broadcom owns VMware now, and I have not touched vSphere since that shift.

Proxmox#

5 Years of Experience

This is my homelab virtualization environment. It gives me clean KVM and LXC workflows, solid snapshots and backups, and none of the licensing pain. It is open source, stable, and straightforward once it is set up. Here’s a link if you aren’t familiar.

Container Platforms#

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)#

5 Years of Experience

Used for production workloads on AWS: clusters, services, task definitions, networking, and operations.

Docker Compose#

3 Years of Experience

Used for multi-container stacks in homelab and smaller production deployments, plus local development workflows.

Portainer#

1 Year of Experience

Used as a Docker frontend in my homelab.

Code Management Platforms#

GitHub#

4 Years of Experience

Used across client projects and personal work for day-to-day source control and collaboration.

GitLab#

2 Years of Experience

Used internally for homelab projects, including my “X as Code” content.

Bitbucket#

2 Years of Experience

Used previously for projects at a prior employer.

CI/CD Platforms#

GitHub Actions#

4 Years of Experience

Used for pull request checks, Terraform validation and plan workflows, and production deployment automation in both client and personal repositories.

Configuration as Code#

Ansible Automation Engine#

2 Years of Experience

Used to configure and maintain EC2 fleets for clients, with hundreds of assets under management.

Chef Infra#

1 Year of Experience

Used previously to manage Linux configurations at a prior employer.

Syxsense Cortex#

3 Years of Experience

Used previously for Windows and Linux patch management at a prior employer.

Infrastructure as Code#

Terraform#

3 Years of Experience

Client environments are managed through PR-locked Terraform workflows.

Database Platforms#

PostgreSQL#

3 Years of Experience

Used for production database administration and operational support across on-prem and cloud-backed environments.

Amazon Aurora RDS (PostgreSQL)#

3 Years of Experience

Used for managed PostgreSQL workloads in AWS, including production operations and reliability-focused maintenance patterns.

Secrets Management Platforms#

HashiCorp Vault#

4 Years of Experience

Used for internal Proxmox projects where centralized secret management is needed.

AWS Secrets Manager#

4 Years of Experience

Used in production customer and client environments for storing and retrieving application and infrastructure secrets.

Infisical#

1 Year of Experience

Used for internal tooling workflows for clients where centralized secret management is needed.

Load Balancers#

Nginx#

5 Years of Experience

Used in homelab and production environments across multiple client projects.

AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB)#

3 Years of Experience

Used heavily in production environments for HTTP/HTTPS routing, TLS termination, and service front-door patterns. ALB is excellent and has been a reliable part of my AWS stack.

Caddy#

2 Years of Experience

Used in production as a reverse proxy and TLS edge. Automatic HTTPS and simple configuration make it easy to run and maintain with Ansible and config-as-code workflows. Here’s a link if you aren’t familiar. Great for when ALB is too much overhead.

Scripting Languages#

Bash#

5 Years of Experience

Bash handles the ad-hoc work that does not justify a full Ansible workflow. This xkcd is relevant.

Python#

5 Years of Experience

I do not write customer-facing software in Python as my primary job. I use it for internal automation, reports, audits, and API-driven glue work (Boto3, Atlassian libraries, and similar tooling).

Inference and Language Models#

I use language models heavily at work and at home, but with hard boundaries. I keep usage to domains where I already have depth, so I can catch mistakes quickly. I avoid shipping AI-generated customer-facing content. If it is an internal tool, internal note, or Dockerfile grunt work, then all bets are off. Frankly, I rarely write code from scratch anymore; the workflow is usually prompting -> modifying -> prompting -> modifying -> testing -> modifying -> testing -> committing. I wrote more about that loop here: Spec Driven Development.

Claude Code#

2 Years of Experience

Used extensively for debugging, technical drafting, and working through implementation options in areas where I already know the domain.

Cursor#

2 Years of Experience

Used daily for coding, issue investigation, and personal projects. I pay for the top personal tier (~$200/month) and use it constantly, but final customer-facing output stays human-authored.

Groq#

Ongoing · API inference (Python and other automation)

Groq (with a Q) is useful when I need fast API-based inference inside Python and automation workflows. It is easy to wire into internal tooling and fast enough for practical scripting loops.

Operating Systems#

Linux (RHEL & Debian)#

12 Years of Experience

Linux is what got me interested in computers in the first place. Being able to change how software behaved and how the UI looked was a big deal to me early on, and it still is.

These days I mostly run macOS on an M4 MacBook Pro, but most real work still happens over SSH on Linux systems and container hosts.

I spend a lot of time building containers, so yes: Linux turtles all the way down. This xkcd is relevant.

Windows#

4 Years of Experience

I can support it when needed, but I avoid it for development workflows when I have a choice. This xkcd is relevant.

macOS#

5 Years of Experience

Daily-driver laptop platform (M4 MacBook Pro). Solid hardware, good terminal environment, and easy SSH-first workflows into Linux systems.