Jeff Smith

I've been working in IT since 1998, starting out as a system administrator wrangling Windows NT 3.5 and Linux boxes before either of them was particularly forgiving. I knew I'd end up working with computers back in the third grade and never seriously questioned it. Over the years the work has shifted from racking servers and keeping them alive to writing the code and infrastructure that does the keeping-alive for me -- which is roughly how I ended up as a Site Reliability Engineer. Off the clock I build self-hosted developer tools and agentic AI systems, mostly in Go and Python, and run a homelab built around a fleet of Dell enterprise servers, a Cisco Nexus 10G switch, and a 10 Gbps symmetric residential fiber connection -- which I'm slowly bringing under proper infrastructure-as-code management.

When I'm not at a keyboard you'll find me on a trail somewhere, hunting raids in Pokemon Go (already planning for GoFest 2026), or losing an evening to anything space-related -- rockets, telescopes, the slow strange physics of it all. I'm a lifelong video game collector across retro and modern, console and PC, with a soft spot for city builders and systems games like Factorio and Pokopia -- anything with a satisfying loop and a spreadsheet hiding underneath. Currently reading Thinking in Systems, and bouncing between Helldivers 2 missions with my weekly game group and Pokopia on the Switch 2.