Data Warehouse for Cloud Compliance Verification
Built a compliance data warehouse for an In-Q-Tel portfolio company using AWS Glue, Spark, and S3. The system automated FedRAMP and PCI DSS compliance...
What It Is
A hierarchical, permissioned operating system manages processes, memory, and files through a kernel that enforces resource isolation, scheduling, and hardware abstraction.
What This Domain Trains You To Notice
This domain is valuable because software and platform systems make interfaces explicit. They reveal how modules compose, where abstractions leak, how change propagates, and how operational discipline keeps complex systems evolvable.
Why It Transfers
The same lens transfers far beyond software. Once you can reason about state, isolation, coordination, and failure here, you are better prepared to understand teams, institutions, and other layered systems. This domain gets more useful when it is compared with adjacent systems instead of being treated as a silo. That is where reusable judgment starts to form.
Related Domains
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Integrated applications combine frontend interfaces, backend logic, databases, and APIs into cohesive systems.
Homelab and Infrastructure
My homelab is both a workshop and a proving ground.
Kubernetes systems
Container orchestration platforms schedule workloads, manage service discovery, and enforce desired state across clusters of compute resources.
Photo Sharing Site — Self-Hosted
Built and ran a self-hosted photo sharing platform before cloud storage made it trivial — covering web dev, storage, auth, and the enduring question of how to make a growing photo library actually useful.
Platform ecosystems
Extensible systems enable third parties to build on top of core infrastructure through APIs, standards, and governance.
Praxis — The Magnolia Homelab
A 4-node Proxmox cluster running Kubernetes, Ceph, site-to-site VPNs to AWS, GitOps pipelines, and a full observability stack — built to test every architecture I recommend to clients.
Reliability Engineering Systems (SLI/SLO/SLA)
Systems define, measure, and enforce reliability targets across infrastructure and applications.
Routing systems (BGP, etc.)
Distributed decision systems determine network paths based on policy and topology, balancing reachability, performance, and control.
Scaling to Millions of Loan Customers
A multi-year initiative to scale a cloud-native, serverless loan management platform on AWS for a student and consumer debt company. Wrote Architecture...