About The Ops Mechanic

I’m a Director of Cloud Operations with 28 years in Unix, infrastructure, and cloud. I manage multiple teams across the world and have interviewed hundreds of DevOps and infrastructure engineers. I write about the tools, practices, and hard-won lessons that actually matter in production — and now I help people land the jobs where they’ll use them.

I started on heavy iron in 1997. Sun SPARCstations, AIX, HP-UX. The kind of systems where you learned to respect the fundamentals because the abstractions we rely on today simply didn’t exist. Since then I’ve worked through every wave — physical data centers to virtualization to cloud to containers to whatever we’re calling the current thing.

I still keep my hands on the keyboard daily. I write code in Python and Rust, live in Emacs with Evil mode, and believe that the best infrastructure engineers never stop being operators — no matter what their title says.

What I Write About

This blog covers the hard problems in production infrastructure — the stuff that isn’t in the vendor docs, the debugging sessions that take unexpected turns, and the security practices that actually hold up under pressure.

Interview Coaching

After spending hundreds of hours on the hiring side of DevOps interviews, I started offering coaching to help candidates prepare for technical evaluations. If you’re preparing for an infrastructure role, I can help.

→ Learn about coaching services

Other Projects

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