Contract work
I build and operate the unglamorous layer: clusters, monitoring, backups, and the pipelines that ship code. I take on part-time contract and retainer work, around 10 to 15 hours a week, on projects where that focus is worth more than a full-time seat.
Everything below links to the actual code or the actual incident writeup. If a number appears on this page, you can go read the thing that produced it.
For a small, well-defined first piece of work I will quote a fixed price instead of hourly, so you can judge the result before committing to anything ongoing.
Four things, each with the work that backs it.
Multi-environment clusters with HA control planes, a virtual IP that survives node loss, ingress, and a documented rebuild path. Not a demo cluster: dev, staging and production, each isolated and each proven with a real workload.
Control-plane failover tested by killing the VIP holder: traffic moved in about 3 seconds. etcd fsync p99 measured between 8.0 and 12.8 ms across the three clusters (7 October 2026) against a 25 ms budget.
Most monitoring proves a process is running. That is the weakest possible signal. I build output checks: did the pipeline actually produce anything, did the backup actually contain data, did the certificate actually renew.
115 signals as of 8 October 2026. It caught a certificate under 7 hours from expiry, a renewal timer that restarted a service 67 times in a day, and a trace pipeline that had silently ingested nothing for two days.
A backup that has never been restored is a hypothesis. I set up the backup, then break something on purpose and restore it, then automate a verifier that fails loudly when a restore would not work.
The first verifier here printed a 0-byte warning and RESTORE VERIFIED in the same run. It computed the right answer and ignored it. That is the bug class I look for.
Pipelines that fail for the right reason. I prove a check works by making it go red on purpose before I trust it, because a check that has never failed is decoration.
A self-hosted forge whose first green run was a false positive, kept untrusted until the same pipeline passed correct code and failed a sentinel assertion. This site's own CI does the same: every custom check was red-run against a deliberately broken tree before it shipped.
Tell me what is broken or what you are trying to stand up, and I will tell you how I would approach it and what it would take. No pitch deck, no discovery process.