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've been doing here

Two main engagements. At Jefferies, a US investment bank, I led 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 was 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 led 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 was 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.