About

There’s a joke in IT that if you can survive long enough to automate your own job, you’ve earned the right to move on. I think that’s a bit reductive since the good stuff lives in the doing, not just the delegating. That’s probably why I keep coming back to infrastructure: it’s where theory crashes headlong into the physical world. And when it breaks? That’s when it gets interesting.

I’m Halley, IT infrastructure engineer, security pragmatist, occasional documentation pedant. I work at the messy intersection of uptime, maintainability, and whatever the business just decided was urgent five minutes ago. Right now, that means leading infrastructure and cybersecurity efforts at Swagelok Central UK.

I’m certified in a number of things (CompTIA CSIS, Microsoft fundamentals, etc.), but what really matters is the ability to think clearly under pressure, solve hard problems without making new ones, and write the kind of documentation someone might actually want to read twice guessing how much of it (if any) was written by AI and how much of it is copypasta from someone else’s website.

Fun fact, I enjoy writing. AI is great but there are far too many emdashes littered about with emojis to take most of its output seriously.

I care about secure defaults, automating where it counts, and making things more legible for the next person in the room even if that person is future-me on two hours of sleep, which is usually the case since I am proud parent to a 1-year-old.

Outside of work, I spend an unreasonable amount of time poking at Linux, playing with Proxmox, and turning half-baked shell scripts into wholewheat automation (good line lol). Sometimes I even write about it. I’ve got full bucket of posts queued up on Ansible, infra patterns, and the deep weirdness of tech culture. You can expect some strong opinions, a few half-reasonable takes, and the occasional walk-back when I learn something new. Writing, for me, is a way to clear mental cache and keep moving.

You’ll find a status page, a /now page, and a growing pile of side projects scattered around this site. None of which are hosted here as I enjoy being a part of the Fediverse. Whether you’re here out of curiosity or fell down a link-hole somewhere, welcome. I hope you find something useful. Or at least familiar.

If you want to talk infra, write code, trade notes on self-hosting, or complain about modern computing then find me on IRC or XMPP.

– Halley