About me

I've been doing this for thirty years, which means I started before "DevOps" was a word and watched the whole thing arrive — bare metal, then virtual machines, then the cloud, then the realisation that none of it matters if developers can't ship. These days I work the platform side of that problem: the tooling, pipelines and golden paths that let a few hundred engineers move without standing on each other.

I'm London-based, originally Norwegian, with Polish heritage that the surname gives away. I contract through Calitii, now part of Synechron, which puts me on regulated-sector programmes — banks and public-sector bodies where "move fast and break things" is not on the table and the audit trail has to be real.

What I'm doing now

Two main engagements. At Jefferies, a US investment bank, I'm leading the migration of six business units off Bitbucket and Bamboo onto GitHub Enterprise and Actions — reusable workflow templates across Maven, Gradle, .NET, Python and Node, self-hosted runners on AKS, and the GitHub Enterprise governance written as Terraform so it's reviewable instead of a pile of console clicks. The bit I'm proudest of is the boring bit: production Bamboo pipelines cut over to Actions with nobody noticing.

At the National Energy System Operator I'm leading a team building Backstage as an internal developer platform — self-service scaffolding, golden-path templates, and one place to find who owns what. The work is as much about defining the operating model as writing the code.

How I work

I'm happiest when I can do the whole arc — architect the thing, write the Terraform, then stand in front of the CTO and explain why. I don't think those are separate jobs. The architecture decisions that survive contact with production are usually made by people who've also had to operate it at 3am.

A couple of things I believe, after enough scar tissue to mean them: security controls developers route around are worse than no controls, because they cost you the same and buy you nothing. Infrastructure you can't rebuild from a clean checkout isn't infrastructure, it's a liability with a hostname. And most "we need a platform team" problems are really "we never wrote down the golden path" problems.

War stories

At Live-Tech Games I scaled a platform to a million concurrent users on AKS — a redesign into microservices and some fairly aggressive autoscaling, under a launch deadline that did not move. At Ofgem I moved legacy regulatory applications onto a microservices architecture and wrote the DevSecOps blueprints the organisation standardised on. At R3 I ran a multinational DevSecOps team on their distributed-ledger products and put real SRE practice in place — SLOs, error budgets, the lot.

Open source & side projects

A lot of how I learn a tool is by building something real with it and putting it on GitHub. Most of these started as "I wonder if…" on a weekend and turned into things I actually use.

AI & LLM tooling. ollama-skill-cv-rag does CV and skill analysis with retrieval-augmented generation on top of Ollama; SOW-generator drafts statements of work for consulting engagements with an LLM; and nix-ai-help is a NixOS environment for running and poking at open-source models.

NixOS & cloud infrastructure. A cluster of experiments in reproducible local cloud: nix-local-cloud, k8s-local-clouds, ks3-nixos-vms (lightweight k3s on NixOS VMs), and nix-llm-vms for running models on throwaway machines.

Developer tools. Commit-tracking-mcp is an MCP server for analysing git history, and tinky-llm-buddy is a small AI dev assistant. There's also SkillAi and the Kosli/ServiceNow MCP servers — those get the full write-up over on Work.

Away from the keyboard

I tinker with NixOS and the COSMIC desktop more than is strictly reasonable, and I've written a few Rust applets for it. I was a governor at the Norwegian School in London for four years. I speak English, Norwegian and Polish. And I'll happily lose an afternoon to a music festival lineup.

They say cloud makes you feel younger. I've been 25 for about twenty-five cloud years now.

If any of this is your kind of problem, I'm easy to find — LinkedIn, GitHub, or olaf@freundcloud.com.