James Brink

My passion for learning is second only to that of solving complex problems with elegant solutions.

James Brink: Tinkerer of Terror

I’m a battle-hardened SRE/DevOps engineer who’s spent decades making computers do things they’d rather not. My days are filled with breaking and fixing infrastructure, constantly switching between Terraform, NixOS, and whatever shiny tech caught my ADHD brain’s attention this week.

When I’m not knee-deep in configuration files or brute-forcing my way through yet another learning curve, you might find me pointing cameras at the night sky. My astrophotography hobby lets me escape the digital chaos by… creating a different kind of chaos involving expensive equipment, sleep deprivation, and the constant disappointment of cloud cover appearing exactly when a celestial event peaks. Somehow capturing photons from millions of light-years away feels more straightforward than getting Kubernetes to behave consistently.

I’ve been everything from a Director of Infrastructure to “that guy who fixed the server at 3 AM because he wrote the broken code in the first place.” My relationship with Linux is both my longest and most dysfunctional commitment.

My technical superpowers include:

  • Making cloud infrastructure bend to my will (mostly)
  • Turning caffeine directly into automation scripts
  • Creating documentation that future me will completely ignore
  • Converting complex systems into slightly less complex systems
  • Explaining technical concepts while watching eyes glaze over
  • Staying awake for 36 hours straight to photograph that “once in a lifetime” comet that ends up looking like a smudge

If you’re looking for polished perfection, you’re in the wrong place. But if you want honest insights from someone who’s made every infrastructure mistake possible (and invented a few new ones), pull up a terminal and stick around.