About
Infrastructure person. Builds things that are supposed to be boring, then writes down why they were not.
Hello, I am Paul. I design and run networks, hypervisors and identity systems for organisations whose budget line for "enterprise" is a shrug. The servers are usually second-hand, the firewalls come in pairs, and every decision gets a written record so that future me cannot pretend it was somebody else's idea.
Things that are true
- One of my disaster-recovery sites is a 2014 Mac Mini holding 2 critical applications with some encrypted data, just in case. Used once. Lifesaver.
- I once tripped a power circuit by switching on two servers and a firewall at the same time. The firewall was fine. The lights were not.
- My tools default to dry-run. So do I, before coffee.
- I believe "it worked in the GUI" is the start of a story, not the end of one.
- I have written more decision records than birthday cards. The decision records are better organised.
This site
Everything here is about systems I actually ran. Clients and employers are left out on purpose; the design decisions are the point. If a post saves you one late night, that was the idea.
The serious version
Job titles, dates and the years I wore a collar live on LinkedIn, which is better at that sort of thing than I am.