I’m Tom, and this is where I write down the stuff I’d otherwise forget by next Tuesday.

I started out in IT admin work, mostly knowing which button to click, then figuring out PowerShell was a much faster way to click it for me. That snowballed. Exchange automation turned into scripting, scripting turned into Kubernetes controllers written in Go, and somewhere along the way I ended up doing networks and cloud platform engineering at Xero, living day to day in AWS, CDN (Akamai), and Kubernetes.

I’m not a “real” programmer by trade. Most of what I build is the end result of a lot of googling, reading other people’s code, and lately, a lot of back-and-forth with AI tools like Claude Code. I’ve made my peace with that. These days the bottleneck isn’t writing the code, it’s figuring out what’s worth building.

Most of what’s here is Field Notes: the troubleshooting write-ups I wish I’d found when I hit the same wall, on Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, and whatever else broke that week. Every so often there’s a Reflections post instead, where I zoom out and think out loud about certifications, conferences, or how the AI-shaped ground keeps shifting under this job.

If any of it saves you an hour of googling, it did its job.

Last modified on 2026-08-16