Every infrastructure engineer has been saved by somebody’s blog at 2am. Random person, no introduction, exactly the post they needed. The name’s a nod to that. I’m just a guy, with a blog, hoping to help you with a tech problem.

The day job: I’m a Principal Infrastructure Engineer at Spreedly, working on payments orchestration. Twenty-plus years across systems, infrastructure, reliability, and platform engineering. I’ve personally led most of the infrastructure transitions of the last two decades… bare metal to cloud, click-ops to IaC, manual ops to config management, monolith to containers, and currently the AI-augmented engineering shift. The receipts are on LinkedIn if you want them.

What I write about here

Three threads, mostly.

The current shift, from inside. What AI is actually changing about senior infrastructure work, written by someone using these tools daily on production payments infrastructure. Practical, not hype.

Pattern recognition across platform shifts. Twenty years of watching infrastructure get rewritten. What rhymes between bare-metal-to-cloud and what’s happening now. Which signals to take seriously, which to ignore.

The IC and management arc. I went IC → manager → director → back to Principal IC. There’s a thing or two to say about that, and about where senior engineers actually create value.

Some posts are long-form thinking. Some are short fix-it-and-move-on tech notes. The thing they have in common is I wrote them down so I could find them later.

Elsewhere

Currently open to Principal or Senior Staff infrastructure roles.