About

Hi, I’m Tommy.

I’m a platform engineer who has spent almost two decades in and around enterprise IT - long enough to have watched “the server room” turn into “the cloud console” - my first task as a graduate in 2009 was literally going into the data centre to audit how many servers we had - and to have migrated a few legacy systems along the way.

I started out supporting business applications, building ETL and dashboards for government, back when a good night’s sleep depended on a batch job finishing on time (unfortunately on-call rosters still exist today for a lot of companies). Over the years I drifted towards the infrastructure underneath: monitoring the mission-critical systems that can’t go down, and eventually building and migrating cloud platforms across AWS, GCP, and Azure for banks, public sector, and utilities companies.

These days I spend most of my time in Terraform, Bicep, and CI/CD pipelines - building platforms, automating the boring parts, and helping teams get comfortable running their own cloud infrastructure. I like learning and building random stuff in my spare time but I’m afraid Claude has made me dumber and smarter at the same time.

Why /var/log?

In Unix/Linux, /var/log is where everything gets logged - the successes, the warnings, and the errors which are crucial for troubleshooting. This site is my version of that: a collection of posts where I log the mistakes I made, the problems I’ve worked through, and the things I want to remember for the future.

You can find me on GitHub and LinkedIn, or take a look at my resume.