[{"body":"","link":"https://r055le.github.io/","section":"","tags":null,"title":""},{"body":" Sr. DevSecOps Engineer with 13 years in IT. I walk into environments with no documentation, no CI/CD, and no observability, and I leave behind infrastructure that actually works.\nFederal/DoD compliance, Iron Bank containers, Platform One deployments, and the less glamorous stuff — migrating legacy systems between clouds without losing data and untangling years of manual deployment processes.\nWhy This Site Exists DevOps is backend's backend. The work is gritty, low-signal, and invisible by design — if people notice what you're doing, it's usually because something broke. Everything is tailored to different environments, \u0026quot;DevOps\u0026quot; means something different everywhere, and the most interesting work is often behind NDAs or in private infrastructure.\nSo I never had a public portfolio. What would that even look like? It's not frontend — there's no render, no screenshot, no demo link.\nThis site and the labs on my GitHub are my answer to that question. They demonstrate decisions, not just code — SLO math, alert philosophy, chaos engineering outcomes, deployment lifecycle patterns. The things that matter when you're operating services, not just building them.\nDetroit, MI ","link":"https://r055le.github.io/about/","section":"","tags":null,"title":"About"},{"body":"","link":"https://r055le.github.io/tags/career/","section":"tags","tags":null,"title":"Career"},{"body":"","link":"https://r055le.github.io/tags/devops/","section":"tags","tags":null,"title":"Devops"},{"body":"","link":"https://r055le.github.io/tags/portfolio/","section":"tags","tags":null,"title":"Portfolio"},{"body":"","link":"https://r055le.github.io/post/","section":"post","tags":null,"title":"Posts"},{"body":"Hands-on labs demonstrating production-grade infrastructure patterns. Each one is designed to be read — the documentation, decisions, and CI are as much the point as the code.\nSRE \u0026amp; Operations SRE Observability Lab — SLO-based alerting with error budget burn-rate math, chaos engineering with documented expected outcomes, runbooks linked from alerts, request ID correlation across services, promtool-tested alert rules in CI.\nGo Deploy Lab — A Go application through the full deployment lifecycle: multi-stage distroless builds, Kubernetes manifests with security hardening, rolling updates, Kyverno policies, Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards.\nSecurity \u0026amp; Compliance Container Hardening Lab — CIS/Iron Bank-aligned container hardening: non-root builds, OPA/Kyverno policy enforcement, Cosign signing, SBOM generation, Falco runtime detection.\nIaC Security Lab — Policy-as-code for Terraform with tfsec, Trivy, and OPA/Rego static analysis against CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark. No cloud credentials required.\nPlatform K8s Bootstrap Lab — Production-grade Kubernetes platform bootstrap: GitOps, observability, and runtime security from Kind to EKS.\nMLOps Pipeline Lab — Production-grade MLOps deployment pipeline: container hardening, CI/CD, GitOps, observability, and Kyverno policy enforcement around a HuggingFace model.\n","link":"https://r055le.github.io/projects/","section":"","tags":null,"title":"Projects"},{"body":"","link":"https://r055le.github.io/tags/","section":"tags","tags":null,"title":"Tags"},{"body":"DevOps is invisible work. Not \u0026quot;underappreciated\u0026quot; invisible — invisible by design. The ideal day in operations is the one where nothing happens. Your alerting stays quiet, your deployments roll out, your infrastructure handles the spike because you sized it right six months ago. Nobody thanks you for the incident that didn't happen. And the day you finally leave it a well-oiled machine? That's invisible too.\nThis creates a problem when someone asks what you've been doing for the last 13 years.\nI do DevOps, which means I handle server infrastructure automation. That's the version I give at parties — I whittled it down over time because the full answer takes longer than most people's interest in the question. If they lean in, I'll go deeper. Most don't.\nThe Portfolio Problem Frontend engineers can show you a website. Designers hand you a Figma file. When a DevOps engineer interviews, we get \u0026quot;tell me about a time you...\u0026quot; and hope the interviewer follows along.\nThe work itself is scattered across private repos, internal wikis, and environments so locked down that screenshots aren't an option. The most interesting things I've built are behind NDAs. And even if I could show them — what am I showing? Terraform modules? CI pipelines? YAML? None of it means anything without the context of why those decisions were made. To take in the value, you'd need to already be deeply ingrained in this kind of work, and then take the time to walk the code without guidance.\nSo I never built a portfolio. I couldn't figure out what that would even look like.\nWhy Now I'm on layoff number four in three years. The industry's doing what it's doing — costs, overstaffing corrections, the AI of it all — and I'm not here to dissect that. Something needed to change on my end.\nBeing wholly capable of handling the job and being able to communicate that are two very different things. I'm significantly better at the former. That gap needed to close.\nWhat I Did About It I started building labs. Not tutorials — the distinction matters. A tutorial is guided: do X, get Y. These were built for me, not for a viewer. I needed to recreate work I've done before in a form that could actually exist in public. Figuring out what to do with it came later.\nThe code is almost secondary. What matters is the reasoning that doesn't live in the files — why burn-rate alerting instead of thresholds, why multi-window instead of single-window, what actually happens to your error budget when Redis goes down. You can read the YAML and see what was configured. You can't see why unless someone writes it down.\nThat's what this blog is for. The labs are the evidence. The writing is the context that makes the evidence legible.\nNot Everyone Has a React App Not everybody has a frontend portfolio with a React app and a live demo. Not everybody has ex-Meta or ex-Google in their headline, and honestly, not everybody should aspire to it. There's a whole layer of this industry that keeps things running, and the people doing that work don't have a great answer for \u0026quot;show me what you've built.\u0026quot;\nInvisible work wears on you. It doesn't help with imposter syndrome when your biggest accomplishments are things that didn't break. You can't exactly share a link to the outage that never happened.\nThis is my attempt at something shareable — without having to set everything on fire or make up metrics for how I saved someone some fabricated amount of dollars I was definitely not tracking.\nWhat's Next There's more to write. The next posts will get into specifics — the alert math, the chaos engineering methodology, what \u0026quot;production-grade\u0026quot; actually means when nobody's watching. Less about me, more about the work.\n","link":"https://r055le.github.io/post/the-invisible-portfolio/","section":"post","tags":["devops","career","portfolio"],"title":"The Invisible Portfolio"},{"body":"","link":"https://r055le.github.io/categories/","section":"categories","tags":null,"title":"Categories"},{"body":"","link":"https://r055le.github.io/series/","section":"series","tags":null,"title":"Series"}]