About
Infrastructure, Linux, and the long bet on systems work.
I’m Alec. I work on the parts of the stack that don’t get glamorous writeups — provisioning, configuration, the bits between the application and the metal. Most of what I do day-to-day is infrastructure work in finance: latency-sensitive environments where the difference between “it runs” and “it runs correctly” matters and is paid for.
This site is where I write down what I learn — partly to remember it, partly because the act of writing forces me to actually understand it.
AI is bad at systems work. That fact is the basis of my career bet.
Read the full thinking →How I got here
The path was practical and unglamorous. I picked up the CompTIA A+ to get in the door, then worked as a hardware technician on high-frequency trading servers at colocation facilities. From there, into a broader datacenter role on market infrastructure — more software, more networking, more systems. I earned my RHCSA with a perfect score along the way, which formalized the Linux fundamentals I’d been building piecemeal.
Each step taught me something I couldn’t have learned from a course. HFT hardware work taught me what latency-sensitive really means. The datacenter role gave me the breadth — networking gear, storage, virtualization, the whole stack you don’t appreciate until you’ve had to coax it through a maintenance window.
How I work
I learn from documentation, not from chat windows. AI is a phenomenal pointer to where information lives — man pages, official docs, RFCs — but it’s a poor substitute for reading the source itself. I keep an Anki deck of where to find things, not what to do, because the act of looking up authoritative documentation is itself a skill that compounds.
When I write here, I try to do the same thing: explain why something is done a certain way, not just paste the command. Systems knowledge is mostly context, and context is what’s missing from most of what’s online.
What’s next
Near term, finishing the RHCE. After that, CCNA for networking depth and the RHCA with specialties in performance tuning and troubleshooting. The long game is high-ownership systems work — the kind where expertise compounds and shortcuts don’t survive contact with production.
Credentials
Get in touch
Email is the best way to reach me — apb718@gmail.com. I read everything; I reply to most things eventually.