“THEBWT”
SRE for dedicated, bespoke production infrastructure. Runs the Kafka datastreams backbone and owns the log pipeline end to end: host collection daemon into regional Kafka, Vector/VRL forwarders, centralized Elasticsearch. Ran the Logstash-to-Vector conversion. Still running those pipelines.
Ran the Debian package infrastructure for the dedicated fleet, and helped out the RPM infrastructure teams. Overhauled enterprise monitoring. Pushed cloud-style tooling and automation into a shop that was mostly dedicated hosting.
Managed server deployments and enterprise-level support as an MSP for thousands of customers. Ad-hoc SRE work across wildly varied environments, too.
Kafka — self-managed, never a managed service. Bare-metal broker fleets and Strimzi on Kubernetes. ZooKeeper to KRaft migration, Connect sinks and DLQs, topic CRDs, consumer-lag alerting into Prometheus.
Rust, Python — production log-proxy daemon in Rust (Kafka backend, on-disk buffering); monitoring and metric-collection agents in Python, shipped through an internal package repo. Built them, then ran them.
Infrastructure runs through agentic AI, deliberately: fleet replatform (Salt → ansible-pull GitOps) and ops tooling executed by orchestrating Claude — PR-gated, human-reviewed, config as source of truth. Custom MCP knowledge servers (PostgreSQL + pgvector, OIDC-gated) give the agents semantic recall over the fleet's runbooks. The agents do the typing; the operator owns intent, review, and blast radius.
Runs a multi-host homelab: Tailscale mesh, ansible-pull GitOps, a full Prometheus / Grafana / Elasticsearch observability stack, and backups that get tested. BookOrbit and SC Blueprint Forge run on it.
Identity and mail run in-house. Self-hosted OIDC + LDAP provider fronting every service on the mesh; own mail server, LDAP-authenticated, plus a second outbound rail so a provider outage can't take the recovery path down with it.
Published a telemetry mod on the Steam Workshop: chzbrgrStats. Server-authoritative Lua collectors into a Prometheus exporter into Grafana.
Merged: Glances, Holland Backup Manager, recap, nova-agent, kthresher. Debian control files, package automation, container builds. Rackspace era.