Cloud Engineer · Orillia, Ontario, Canada
“Kitchens and cloud systems fail the same way.
I learned to prevent both.”
// About
I spent two decades managing commercial kitchens — First Cook at Horseshoe Resort, then Food Service at Costco Wholesale Canada. You learn fast that a kitchen at full service and a cloud system at peak load have the same failure modes: unclear ownership, missing redundancy, no recovery plan.
In 2024 I started formally bridging those worlds. Google Cybersecurity Certificate. Then the Level Up In Tech 37-week Cloud Engineering program, graduating May 2026. Now I build and document infrastructure on AWS — Terraform-provisioned, GitHub Actions deployed, version controlled, and publicly documented.
I write about the transition in my newsletter, Terraforming My Career — currently at 134+ subscribers and growing.
Cloud & Infrastructure
Infrastructure as Code
Containers & Orchestration
CI/CD & Automation
Systems & Local AI
// Projects
Built a full auto-scaling AWS infrastructure with Terraform — EC2, ALB, ASG, security groups, and more. Documented the 5 things that went wrong along the way so you don't have to find them yourself.
Provisioned a Jenkins CI/CD server on EC2 with Terraform. Hit six distinct failure points — hardcoded AMIs, Java version mismatches, AL2023's switch from yum to dnf, GPG key rotation — and documented every one.
Three-node Docker Swarm cluster on EC2 running a production WordPress stack. When a container dies at 2am, the orchestrator brings it back. No pager, no humans required.
AWS Polly neural text-to-speech pipeline with full GitHub Actions CI/CD. Converts text to audio across multiple languages on every push — OIDC auth throughout, zero stored AWS keys.
Three-node Docker Swarm cluster on AWS EC2 with global service deployment and overlay networking. If a node or container fails, Swarm detects and recovers without human intervention. Built to replicate real production failure conditions.
Automated security audit with systemd timer. First run flagged Apache2 exposed and Open WebUI bound to 0.0.0.0. Reduced flagged services from 3 to 0. Snap storage dropped from 54G to 30G — a 44% reduction.
Bash service watchdog with autonomous recovery. Monitors critical processes, detects failures, and restarts services without human intervention. Built and tested against live Ubuntu infrastructure.
// Contact
Based in Orillia, Ontario, Canada · Open to remote and hybrid across Canada