§ IOpening Scroll
Hello! I'm AJ Caylor, a Senior Platform and Reliability Engineer with a passion for Kubernetes platforms, observability, and infrastructure automation. This portfolio is designed to showcase my skills, experience, and projects in a unique tabletop RPG (Dungeons & Dragons) inspired format. Feel free to explore and learn more about my journey in the tech world.
§ IIBackstory
My Career
I love technology so I forged my career into something that I could actually do for 40 or more years. In University I did not derive a lot of value from the technical courses so I took some courses related to business, accounting, management, finance, and marketing to better understand the professional world I was about to enter. After University I worked in the Government sector in small data centers and managed a 6 node Slurm HPC cluster and a 36 node ESXi cluster. That was my first experience using powerful Linux servers.
During the 2020 pandemic I started to work remotely and was able to spend a few years building AWS infrastructure to support online courses that were previously taught in a classroom with laptops. One of the technologies explored in those courses was Kubernetes which led me to my next job in the Healthcare sector. My current role involves building and operating multi-cloud Kubernetes platforms that support production healthcare workloads. This platform deploys 50+ changes per day, which demands reliable GitOps delivery, infrastructure automation, and observability systems that are maintainable over many years.
I have spent a lot of time designing and maintaining systems to collect metrics, logs, and other telemetry data and send notifications to on-call Engineers as we support Health systems that operate 24/7.
I enjoy unique challenges that I have never faced before that provide an opportunity for me to learn and level up my skills. I derive satisfaction in my career by solving meaningful problems that have a positive impact on humanity and our world. When I am passionate about my work, I can easily focus and accomplish anything I set my mind to. I seek out people who are genuine, empathetic, trustworthy, personable, people who have a sense of humor, and people who are passionate and ambitious.
How do I make decisions?
My first step is to determine the impact, consequences, and successful outcome of a decision. If it has no impact such as “what is for dinner?” I will rely solely on instinct. Every other decision is predicated with a methodical approach. I ensure that I have a plan A, B, and C before making a decision. I value ethos and logos over pathos.
If I feel like I have enough information to make an informed decision, I will consider all consequences and execute my decision. If I feel out of my element, I will reach out to people in my network to hear their perspective and opinions before making a final decision.
Beyond work
Outside of work, I am a father of one little boy and two cats. To stay healthy I love to go hiking in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and lift weights at the local gym. I dabble in landscape photography with a Sony mirrorless camera.
I prefer to have an open-mind about everything in life. I question everything from my personal opinions to the laws of my country. I believe anyone should be free to openly discuss any topic or idea and present their perspective.
If I have free time and the weather is permitting, I prefer to be outside. I love to hike, camp, and explore new places. If it is too cold or too hot or some other inclement weather, I will gravitate to a computer to tinker or play PC games. These days I rarely have free time to indulge in these hobbies.
§ IIIEveryday Loadout
- OSmacOS
- EditorNeovim
- IDEZed
- AI ToolsClaude Code, OpenAI Codex, OpenCode, Pi, Antigravity
- TerminalGhostty
- BrowserZen (Firefox fork)
- “Window Manager”Rectangle
- ShellZsh + antidote + fzf
- MusicApple Music (20+ year iTunes user)
- ChatSlack, Discord, Signal, Telegram, Whatsapp
- CloudAWS 90 %, GCP 5 %, Azure 5 %
- CI/CDGitHub/Gitea Actions, ArgoCD, Jenkins
- ContainersDocker, Kubernetes
- IaCTerraform, Ansible, Crossplane
- MonitoringPrometheus, Grafana, Loki, Mimir, Telegraf, InfluxDB, and OpenTelemetry