~ ❯ about.md
gregroy@gregsplace ~ $ cat about.md

Greg Roy

IT systems administrator and platform SRE in Nipissing First Nation, ON. I build reliable platforms and resilient teams — automation-first delivery, calm incident culture, and mentoring ICs into leaders. I'm equally at home writing Terraform, arguing about SLOs, or sitting in an on-call bridge at 3am trying to make it the last time that particular thing pages anyone.

Operator, not a talker. Most of the interesting things on this site are linked from the README.

Working philosophy

  • People first. Blameless learning beats heroics every time.
  • Small batches. Ship smaller, learn faster, recover easier.
  • Automate toil. Guardrails and templates over tribal knowledge.
  • Measure what matters. SLOs guide priorities; dashboards teams actually use.
  • Docs-first. If it's not written down, it doesn't scale past the person holding it.

How I work

  1. Clarify goals. Align metrics. Pick the smallest helpful change.
  2. Codify pipelines, runbooks, and comms until they're predictable and repeatable.
  3. Instrument dashboards and alerts that catch the real failures, not just the loud ones.
  4. Close the loop with post-incident actions that actually get done — owners, dates, visible follow-through.

Strengths

platform & delivery
GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, container platforms, Helm + ArgoCD, policy gates, preview envs
infra as code
Terraform + Terragrunt modules, Ansible/Chef/Puppet, secrets hygiene, repeatable envs
observability
Prometheus + Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Sentry; golden signals that matter
incident programs
On-call design, severity + comms guides, runbooks with owners, calm command structures
culture & coaching
Mentoring ICs into leaders, team rituals, docs-first habits, durable knowledge
cost & resilience
Autoscaling, rightsizing, budgets and anomaly alerts that don't sacrifice reliability

Toolbox

languages & runtimes
Go, Perl, Java, Ruby on Rails, Tomcat, Jetty, Python, Swift, Node
data & search
PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB/Galera, Hadoop, Vertica, Mongo, Redis, Solr, HBase, Oracle RAC
cloud & infra
AWS, ESXi/VMware, Proxmox, Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, GitLab CI, ArgoCD
web & edge
Nginx, Caddy, Apache, HAProxy, Cloudflare (Tunnel, DNS, Pages), Authelia
observability stack
Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Sentry, Uptime Kuma; legacy: Cacti, MRTG, Snort
workflow
Agile/Scrum/Kanban, SOPs, runbooks, incident reviews, tabletop drills

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experience.md has the formal chronology. contact.md if you want to talk.