Platform & cloud
Building and securing the Google Cloud infrastructure behind a large e-learning platform — GKE, IAM, network topology, and the DevSecOps glue that puts guardrails into CI/CD instead of into a wiki page nobody reads.
Hello, I’m Brad.
I have spent about twenty years keeping other people’s infrastructure upright — university data centers, research clusters, and now a learning platform used by millions. These days I do that as an engineering manager, which mostly means clearing the runway so a very good team can land things.
I started as the person you called when the printer ate your dissertation, and worked outward from there: desktops, then servers, then the racks the servers lived in, then the cloud accounts that replaced the racks, then the pipelines that deploy into them. Somewhere in the middle I figured out that the interesting problems are almost never technical ones.
My bias is toward boring technology, reproducible systems, and documentation that a tired person can follow at 3 a.m. I like configuration management, small sharp command-line tools, and the kind of automation that makes a whole category of incident stop happening.
What I’m about
Systems administration
Two decades of Red Hat and Ubuntu, from a 200-node social science research cluster to a 500-VM university data center. Puppet, then Ansible; Nagios, then whatever came next. The fundamentals have aged remarkably well.
Leading a team
Running sprints, retrospectives, and one-on-ones for a platform engineering team. Mentoring is the part of the job I would keep if I had to give up the rest of it.
Homelab
A rack in the house running more services than I care to admit, which exists mainly so I can break things in a place where breaking things is free. More on that here.
Get in touch
The fastest way to reach me is email. I read everything, I answer most things, and I am always happy to talk about Linux, self-hosting, or how to get out of an on-call rotation that is eating your team alive.