Hi, I’m Simon Arneaud, an independent tech consultant. Welcome to my personal blog.
What I do
My typical day job is what some people call site reliability engineering (SRE). I help organisations develop, deploy and manage software systems that are reliable, maintainable, efficient and scalable (for both machines and people). A good example is the work I did scaling the social media site Vocal. I mostly work for fast-growing small and medium companies that want help across their existing tech stack. Typical requests include
- Production-ready, reliable app deployments on Linux/Unix-like systems (cloud or on-prem, using a wide range of platforms)
- Automation, infrastructure-as-code and development processes
- Site migrations
- Software, networking and systems architecture advice
- Problem-solving in compliance environments
- Performance tuning of apps and databases (mainly PostgreSQL)
I also do programming and other nerdy things as hobbies. Sometimes I publish my programming projects on Gitlab.
Things I post about
You’re probably not interested in all the things I am, so I organise my posts by tag. Most of my posts are about
- Things I’ve learned from SRE work (Reliability, Performance, Software Engineering)
- Things I’ve learned by running my own business (Business, Careers, Sociotechnology)
- Computer science and algorithms (Computer Science)
- Systems programming (Systems Design, Low Level)
- Maths (Mathematics)
- System administration and tooling (Tools, Servers)
- Security (Security)
- Various things I translate from Japanese (Translation and Japanese)
A lot of my hobby programming is in the D programming language, so I often blog about various D-related things.
Can I work for you?
To save some time, check this list before contacting me:
Do you want me to join your company as an employee?
Sorry, I enjoy running my own business, so you’d have to offer me an above-market deal to give it up. Realistically, you’re better off finding someone else who does want to be an employee.
Do you have a cool business idea and want someone to build it?
I recommend reading a book like The Lean Startup, and prioritising finding a market fit as quickly and cheaply as possible. Performance and scalability can come later.
Do you want me to work for a discount because your project is “interesting”?
I’m already interested in a lot of things.
Most “boring” work still has plenty of interesting problems in the details. When people come to me apologising about their “boring” work, I know there’s got to be some other reason it matters to them. That reason usually makes it interesting.