25+ years production infrastructure

DevOps automation-first delivery

Network security BGP, RTBH, threat feeds

AI ops, reporting, tooling

I help turn complex infrastructure into platforms that are easier to operate, easier to recover, and easier for teams to trust.

I Build Infrastructure That Keeps Its Promises

I'm Simon, a UK-based Senior Linux, DevOps, and Platform Engineer with 25+ years of experience building, fixing, automating, and improving production systems.

My work sits where infrastructure, automation, networking, storage, security, and pragmatic software engineering meet. I have spent my career keeping real platforms alive: ISP environments, build systems, Docker and Kubernetes estates, virtualisation platforms, storage, DNS, mail, routing, monitoring, backup, and the operational tooling around them.

These days I am especially interested in the layer between operations and software: the Go and Python tools, CI/CD workflows, Ansible roles, Terraform plans, AI-assisted workflows, and small internal services that turn repeated human effort into reliable platform behaviour.

I am also actively exploring AI-assisted operations: not hype for its own sake, but useful automation, summarisation, reporting, developer support, and internal tools that help engineers understand systems faster and make better decisions.

What I Bring

Area	Signal
25+ years in production infrastructure	Linux, networking, ISP operations, virtualisation, storage, mail, DNS, monitoring, support escalation, and mentoring
DevOps and platform engineering	Ansible, Terraform, Packer, GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins, CI/CD, Docker, Compose, Kubernetes, and automation-first operations
Systems programming for operators	Go and Python CLIs that are small, inspectable, automation-friendly, and built around real operational workflows
Network and service reliability	BGP-aware routing, VPNs, HAProxy, Postfix, Dovecot, DNS, observability, backups, and high-availability service design
Modern internal tooling	Python Flask apps, PowerShell automation, API integrations, web scraping where needed, and AI-assisted reporting workflows
AI adoption	Applying AI where it improves operational clarity: summarisation, internal reporting, workflow assistance, and human-in-the-loop automation

How I Tend To Help

Stabilise Understand the platform, find the real failure modes, and reduce operational noise.

Automate Replace fragile manual steps with code, pipelines, checks, and repeatable workflows.

Modernise Move systems forward without losing sight of reliability, recovery, and the people operating them.

Selected Public Work

A few public examples of the kind of tooling I like to build: practical, operator-facing, and designed to solve specific production problems cleanly.

blackhole-threats Automates network threat response by turning threat feeds into BGP blackhole announcements in real time.	telegram-message-exporter Recovers and exports Telegram messages offline on macOS, decrypting local databases to HTML, Markdown, and CSV.
s3ctl CLI for provisioning S3 buckets, scoped IAM credentials, and batch operations across object-storage estates at scale.	homebrew-s3ctl Homebrew tap for installing s3ctl with a repeatable path for object-storage provisioning tools on macOS and Linux.
s3mirror Production-ready S3 mirroring with parallel transfers, safe deletion, and automation-friendly config for disaster recovery and data migration.	homebrew-s3mirror Homebrew tap for s3mirror, keeping S3-compatible mirroring and migration workflows easy to install and automate.
zquota Fast, zero-dependency terminal CLI for Z.ai quota usage, remaining capacity, and exact rolling reset times.	homebrew-zquota Homebrew tap for installing zquota on macOS and Linux with a simple tap-and-install workflow.

Operating Principles

Calm Production Designing infrastructure that is boring for users and clear for operators.	Useful Automation Replacing manual runbooks with tested automation and readable code.	Operator Tooling Building CLIs and services that fit cron, systemd, CI/CD, and Ansible.
Platform Clarity Making storage, networking, routing, and services easier to reason about.	Developer Velocity Improving build platforms so engineers can ship without fighting machinery.	Team Lift Mentoring engineers, documenting well, and raising the operational quality bar.

Engineering Style

Automate the repeatable.
Document the surprising.
Design for recovery.
Keep production calm.
Make the next fix easier than the last one.

Core Toolbox

Linux        Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat-family systems, macOS, Windows Server
Automation   Ansible, Terraform, Packer, GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins
Runtime      Docker, Docker Compose, Kubernetes, systemd, HAProxy
Code         Go, Python, Bash, PowerShell, Flask, API integrations
Network      DNS, BGP, OSPF, VPNs, VLANs, NAT, routing, firewalls
Services     Postfix, Dovecot, Nginx, Apache, Bind, monitoring, backup
Platforms    Proxmox, VMware, XenServer, Nutanix, KVM, NetApp, Pure, Nimble

GitHub

This profile is a public slice of the work I care about: infrastructure tools, operational notes, experiments, and production-minded utilities from years spent close to the metal.

GitHub profile | Public repositories

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Useful infrastructure. Clear automation. Calm production.