I’m Lester. I’ve spent 20 years telling computers what to do. Sometimes they listen. I’m a Site Reliability Engineer based in Honduras. I build infrastructure, automate everything I can, and write about the stuff I break along the way. This blog is where I share opinions about DevOps, AI, investing, and whatever else I’m thinking about that week.
How I got here
I started writing code in 2006. Built web apps for eight years. Learned what makes systems break (spoiler: everything, eventually). Somewhere along the way I developed an unhealthy obsession with automation. If I had to do something twice, I’d spend four hours writing a script to do it in thirty seconds. The math never worked out, but the principle was sound. By 2014, I’d become the developer who cared more about deployment pipelines than the actual features. The guy who’d stay up debugging why staging was down instead of, you know, shipping product. So I made it official and went full SRE. Best career decision I’ve made, right after “learn to Google error messages before panicking.”
What I do
I’m currently consulting for Fueled, helping build and maintain the kind of infrastructure that lets developers push code without thinking about where it goes. Kubernetes clusters, Terraform modules, CI/CD pipelines, cloud architecture across AWS, Azure, and DigitalOcean. The usual alphabet soup. Most of my time goes into making systems that don’t need me. Automating deploys, building self-healing infrastructure, reducing the 3 AM pages. The goal is always the same: make it boring. Boring infrastructure is reliable infrastructure.
Things I believe
Automate everything. Humans are great at creative problem-solving and terrible at doing the same thing correctly 500 times in a row. Every manual process is a bug you haven’t hit yet. Infrastructure should be invisible. If I’ve done my job right, nobody thinks about the infra at all. Code gets pushed, it deploys, it scales, it works. The best compliment is “I forgot we even had servers.” Simplicity scales. Complex systems break in complex ways. I’ll take boring, well-understood tech over the shiny new thing every time. Kubernetes is exciting until it’s 3 AM and your pods won’t schedule. (I still use Kubernetes. I just don’t pretend it’s simple.)
When I’m not staring at terminals
I play guitar and bass. It’s the only thing that actually makes my brain stop thinking about uptime. Learning a new riff is basically meditation for people who can’t sit still. I watch way too much soccer. Don’t ask about my team’s last season unless you want to see a grown man get emotional. I have two dogs, a Golden Retriever and a Beagle, who are significantly better at work-life balance than I am. They’ve never once checked Slack after dinner.
Say hi
I write about SRE, DevOps, AI, and occasionally about investing (stocks and crypto) when I feel like getting yelled at on the internet. If you want to work together, talk shop, or just argue about Terraform vs Pulumi, find me here:
- GitHub: github.com/lbarahona
- Twitter: x.com/lestermiller
- Email: lestermiller26@gmail.com
