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 running production systems for a living, and eventually out on my own. These days I work independently, building the whole production surface for startup and small teams: the application, the cloud infrastructure under it, and the pipeline that ships it.

The thread running through most of what I write is agentic engineering, meaning building with AI coding agents safely, with guardrails, review, and a human still holding the judgment. I'm drawn to the unglamorous parts: what an agent should be allowed to do unsupervised, where the merge gate belongs, how you test something that gives a different answer every time. Alongside that, the platform craft underneath it: Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD, observability, and keeping credentials out of places they don't belong.

I write here because the stuff I had to learn the hard way shouldn't be hard to learn. Minimal jargon, maximum analogies, and a bias toward what actually happened over what was supposed to. If you're building things, automating things, or working out how to use AI agents without handing them the keys, you're in the right place. Coffee's on.

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