During the day I work at Automattic building Beeper, leading the infrastructure team. Lots of Kubernetes, Go services, bit of sysadmin.
I also spend some of my spare time hacking on various code based projects. These are my current favorite in-progress projects:
pyinfra
pyinfra turns Python code into shell commands and runs them on your servers.
I have also built, and mostly retired, many other projects over the years. My GitHub has some of them. While writing this I figured it’d be fun to make a rough timeline of major milestones along with the languages/skills used and learnt:
2005
Started learning HTML/CSS
At 14 I signed up for Blogger and was instantly hooked. Not with blogging, but tweaking the theme and adding 88x31 buttons.
2006 - 2008
WordPress, PHP and VPS
Settled on this domain and moved to WordPress. Started picking up light PHP in the theme editor. Rented my first VPS and played with cPanel. Got going with JavaScript + jQuery.
2008 - 2009
Garry's Mod, Lua, SQL and dedicated servers
GMod changed everything. Fell in love with Lua writing custom gamemodes. Started renting dedicated servers and hosting. Created Zombified World gamemode, which became one of the most popular GMod servers. Ran a phpBB forum for ~20k member forum for the community. Frequented facepunch.
2010
Afterburst
Founded Afterburst selling VPS on Hetzner dedicated servers. I wrote about this back in 2013. PHP stack and some not great management software (WHMCS, SolusVM).
2011 - 2013
University
Three incredible years in Newcastle doing comp sci. Stopped hosting gameservers but kept writing Lua (there's a few bits on GitHub). Wrote a static site generator Luapress to replace WordPress for this blog.
2013 - 2017
EDITED
Started working at EDITED, quickly gravitated to infra/devops/systems/whatever-you-call-it. Picked up Python, which became my language of choice. Scaled enormous Elasticsearch clusters with thousands of servers.
2015
pyinfra
First commits to pyinfra, been working on it ever since. Three major versions. Read why you should try pyinfra.
2017 - 2021
EDITED Team Lead
Led the infrastructure team at EDITED, scaling up the processing pipeline to >100M products/day. Kubernetes, Elasticsearch, Riak and more. Even more servers.
2017
Kanmail
Wrote Kanmail to scratch an itch. For years it was read only I would just open Gmail to send. Eventually implemented sending/attachments/etc. IMAP isn't too bad but the varied implementations are cursed.
2021 - now
Beeper (an Automattic company)
Joined Beeper running infrastructure. Scaled K8s beyond it's limits. Beeper Mini. Acquired by Automattic. Still building the best chat app.