Josh Kain

Systems Engineer at Clio, based in Manchester. I ended up in infrastructure because I can't stand fighting systems: the whole point of platform work is making things so smooth that getting something up and running takes barely any effort. A good platform engineer isn't the hero fixing production at 2am — they're the reason nobody has to. The part that makes me lose track of time is the understanding: reading the docs, pulling a system apart until I know why it works, not just that it does.

Started in tech the honest way — a Northcoders bootcamp, a barista who wanted options. Now I'm the person thinking about governance, IaC, and why that rushed deployment is going to cost someone a weekend in three months.

"Move fast where you can. Never rush the infrastructure."

Outside of work I'm building out a homelab — Proxmox for virtualisation, OPNsense on the network edge, TrueNAS for storage — where I self-host services, tinker with networking, and build things that sometimes work exactly as intended. This site is one of them.

The same instinct runs the rest of the house: woodworking and DIY, doing everything I possibly can myself — learn the skill rather than pay someone. It turns out "read the docs and have a go" works on stud walls as well as it does on subnets.