About

Hey, I’m Austin

I’m a software engineer based in Los Angeles with a focus on backend systems and infrastructure. I’ve spent most of my career in the AWS ecosystem — building platforms, automating things that shouldn’t be manual, and figuring out how to make distributed systems behave. I hold three AWS associate certifications (Solutions Architect, SysOps Administrator, and Developer), though at this point the hands-on experience matters a lot more than the certs.

What I Do

I work as a DevOps engineer, spending most of my time in Kubernetes, ECS, Terraform, AWS, and GCP. Day to day that means building internal developer tooling, maintaining clusters, and keeping infrastructure codified and reproducible. Before that, I helped rebuild the technical foundation at a YC-backed startup after their CTO left, was engineer #2 at an early-stage startup where I built the backend and data platform from scratch, and started my career as a solutions architect building HIPAA-compliant cloud environments.

The common thread across all of it has been AWS, infrastructure as code, and a preference for building things that are simple enough to actually maintain.

What I’m Into

Go is my favorite language and the one I reach for on every personal project. I love the simplicity of it — there’s usually one obvious way to do something, and the result is fast and easy to reason about.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with AI-assisted development tools lately. Claude Code has become a core part of how I build things — I used it extensively to build LocalCloud, a local cloud emulator that’s become my main side project. I’m also keeping a close eye on OpenAI’s Codex and tools like OpenClaw. The way these tools are changing the development workflow is genuinely exciting, and I enjoy pushing them to see what’s possible.

Outside of code, I spend my time running, working out, and working on the house. My wife and I have two dogs who are very good at interrupting focused work. I wouldn’t trade it.

The Site

This site is built with forge, a static site generator I wrote in Go. The blog is where I write about things I’m building — starting with a series on LocalCloud and local cloud development.