Hi, I'm Brett — a self-taught platform and DevOps engineer who builds things, occasionally breaks them, and writes about both.

I came up the unofficial way: no CS degree, just bootcamps, online courses, late nights, side projects that got delightfully out of hand, and a stubborn refusal to leave a problem unsolved. That path took me from my first lines of JavaScript to building and automating cloud infrastructure for a living — including several years as a platform systems engineer at The Last Mile, helping power tech education for people who didn't get an obvious shot at it. These days I build independently: web apps, cloud infrastructure, and the kind of automation that quietly keeps everything running.

I write here because the stuff I had to learn the hard way shouldn't be hard to learn. So I unpack cloud, IaC, MERN, and whatever I'm currently wrestling with — minimal jargon, maximum analogies, and the occasional pop-culture detour (yes, there's a Terraform tutorial built around a Dune Discord bot). If you're into building things, automating things, or just figuring out this whole engineering life, you're in the right place. Coffee's on.

When I'm not writing, this is my day job. Need cloud infrastructure, automation, or agentic tooling built right? Find me at brett-buskirk.dev.