About Tim Bryant

I'm a passionate Site Reliability Engineer and DevOps practitioner with a deep interest in observability, automation, and cloud infrastructure. I enjoy building tools and systems that make operations more efficient and reliable.

Professional Overview

Current Focus

  • 🔭 Developing tools for system monitoring and URL health checking
  • 🛠️ Building and maintaining cloud-native infrastructure
  • 📝 Sharing technical insights on my blog
  • 🌱 Continuously learning and experimenting with new technologies
  • ⚡ Outside of tech, I enjoy axe throwing, watching sports, collecting pocket knives, and spending time with my family (Wife, Son, Dog, and 2 Cats)

Experience

Over my career in Site Reliability Engineering and DevOps, I've contributed to companies like SimpliSafe, Rackspace Technology, and Vistaprint. My expertise includes:

  • Designing and maintaining robust monitoring solutions using tools such as New Relic, Datadog, Prometheus, and Grafana
  • Leading incident management and resolving issues in business-critical systems to minimize downtime
  • Developing automation tools to streamline operations and enhance efficiency
  • Partnering with cross-functional teams to implement comprehensive observability solutions
  • Establishing and refining incident response and escalation processes for rapid resolution
  • Creating intuitive monitoring dashboards to provide actionable insights and improve system visibility
  • Managing and optimizing complex customer environments and infrastructure at scale
  • Driving continuous improvements in problem management and incident handling practices
  • Implementing production readiness frameworks to ensure system reliability and scalability

Technical Profile

Infrastructure & Cloud

  • Kubernetes and container orchestration (k3s, Docker, Podman)
  • Cloud platforms (OCI, AWS) and virtualization (Proxmox)
  • Infrastructure as Code with Terraform
  • Automated deployment pipelines (Jenkins, Github Actions)
  • Network and storage management

DevOps & SRE

  • Observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic, Datadog)
  • Incident response and problem management
  • Configuration management with Ansible
  • GitOps workflows and CI/CD pipelines (ArgoCD)
  • Performance optimization and monitoring

Development

  • Python (and now some Go) automation and tooling
  • Shell scripting and environment customization
  • SQL and database operations
  • Version control with Git
  • Technical documentation

Notable Projects

  • NV Config Switcher

    • Simple utility for switching between Neovim configurations
    • Enables easy testing of different editor setups
    • Improves Neovim configuration management

  • SysInformer

    • Lightweight system information tool
    • Reports basic system metrics and status
    • Focused on simplicity, readability, and portability

  • SOPS File Encryption Check

    • Security tool for validating SOPS-encrypted files
    • Ensures sensitive data remains properly encrypted
    • Helps prevent accidental exposure of secrets by integrating with pre-commit hooks

Active Projects

  • One-Updater

    • Unified system update automation tool
    • Handles package updates across multiple systems
    • Streamlines maintenance of various environments

  • Kubernetes Apps

    • Repository of Kubernetes application manifests
    • GitOps workflow for k3s cluster deployments
    • Application configuration templates and examples

  • Docker Apps

    • Collection of Docker Compose configurations
    • Ready-to-deploy container setups
    • Personal container service definitions

  • PingPulse

    • URL and DB monitoring and health checking tool
    • Prometheus metrics to track availability and response times
    • YAML configuration with minimal required fields for quick setup

Automation & Infrastructure

  • automation-ansible

    • Ansible playbooks for automated system configuration
    • Covers server setup, application deployment, and maintenance tasks

  • automation-terraform

    • Infrastructure as Code for cloud resources
    • Primarily focused on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
    • Includes modules for compute, networking, and storage

  • helper-scripts

    • Collection of Bash scripts for Linux and RHEL/Oracle Linux systems
    • Includes installation/uninstallation scripts for various tools and configurations (e.g., Podman, Prometheus, etc.)
    • Features database backup scripts and other utility functions for system maintenance

Development Tools

  • dotfiles

    • Comprehensive development environment configurations
    • Shell customizations, editor settings, and productivity tools
    • Cross-platform support for both general and Linux-specific needs

Connect With Me

Want to dive deeper into my technical setup? Check out my homelab page where I detail my home infrastructure and experiments.