I'm Brian — a DevOps engineer and manager based in Melbourne, Australia. Most of my working life is spent keeping other people's systems running, which is also, more or less, how I spend my evenings.
What's here
This blog is a running log of the stuff I build, break, and fix — mostly homelab work: Raspberry Pis doing jobs they were never quite designed for, Prometheus and Grafana stacks watching things that don't need watching, and the occasional systemd unit file I'll need again in six months and won't remember writing. I also write the odd piece of industry commentary when something about the DevOps/platform engineering world has been sitting wrong with me, and I review hardware I've actually bought and used — handhelds, single-board computers, whatever's on the bench at the time.
If a post has a command in it, I've run that command. If it doesn't work for you, it's probably because your setup differs from mine in some annoying way — feel free to say so in the comments.
Off the clock
Outside of terminals, I'm usually pointing a camera at something — astrophotography when the sky and the Bortle scale cooperate, regular photography when they don't. I also cook a lot and mix a genuinely excessive number of tiki drinks, so don't be surprised if either sneaks into a post that's nominally about infrastructure.
Get in touch
The easiest way to reach me is Bluesky, or drop a comment on any post — I read them all, even the ones from six years ago.