I’m dryack online, “Dr. Yack” if you’re feeling generous or one of my closer colleagues. I’m a Senior DevOps Engineer with about a decade in tech, following an earlier career that included corporate investigations, loss prevention, club security, electrical work, and a memorable stint at a zoo gift shop. The through-line, if there is one: I like figuring things out under pressure.

I’m a generalist by necessity—but if I’m honest, also by preference. I like having a finger in every pie and a reason to talk to every team. I’m drawn to SRE, DBRE, and platform engineering. I love databases, which makes most of my DevOps colleagues look at me like I’ve lost my mind. Postgres mostly, but I’ve got a soft spot for MariaDB, Redis, and DragonflyDB. I used to specialize in early Cassandra—which is where I first encountered Bloom filters and fell down a rabbit hole into probabilistic data structures that I still haven’t climbed out of.

I like building internal tools—security automation, fleet-wide SSH orchestration, vendor replacement services that run for pennies. I like solving problems that make other people’s jobs easier. My day-to-day involves Ansible, Jenkins, AWS, and on-prem infrastructure. I became our F5 iRules expert by accident, going from “I have no idea what this is” to writing complex routing logic because someone had to.

Outside of work: I run a homelab, volunteer with my local fire department, raise chickens, own too many books, collect polearms, and play at blacksmithing. I use LLMs as thinking partners more than I probably should—but time is limited. I’m no computer science graduate or former FAANG engineer. I’m just a guy who’s been solving problems professionally for a while, and figured maybe I should write about it at last.

I’m also still looking for the thing that makes me want to go deep and stay there. Right now the leading candidates are probabilistic data structures and lossless compression—though the compression work keeps bumping into math I don’t have. Lately I’ve been exploring semantic compression with LLM-mediated decompression, which started from an idle question about cosmology and ended up somewhere in quantum information theory. That’s usually how it goes.

This blog is part of that search. Expect posts about Go, systems programming, performance work, and whatever else I happen to be curious about. The pace will be irregular.