About me
I turn operational experience into better systems.
I’m Stephen McCruden, a Field Service Technician II focused on reliable infrastructure, automation, and the disciplined work required to keep important systems running.
01
Professional work
Reliability starts before the incident.
I support mission-critical public-safety communications infrastructure. My work includes system upgrades, lab validation, troubleshooting, documentation, and coordinating technical work across teams and customer environments.
That environment has shaped how I approach engineering: understand the dependencies, document the procedure, validate the result, and prepare for what happens when something fails. A system is only as reliable as the people, processes, and recovery paths around it.
02
The homelab
A lab for practicing the full operating model.
My primary engineering project is a three-node Kubernetes platform running on Proxmox. It is a reproducible environment for infrastructure engineering—not simply a collection of self-hosted applications.
The cluster has been destroyed and rebuilt without undocumented manual intervention. Ongoing work expands storage, centralized logging, disaster recovery, application delivery, and deliberate failure testing.
Explore the homelab repositoryEngineering principles
How I decide what “done” means.
Recovery should be executable.
If a system cannot be reconstructed predictably, its recovery process is incomplete.
Healthy-looking is not enough.
System behavior and failure signals need to be visible before a decision can be trusted.
Knowledge should survive handoff.
Architecture decisions, procedures, and incident lessons should outlive the person who found them.
Trust follows testing.
Backups, automation, and high availability become credible only after the failure path is exercised.
Working toolkit
Technologies I use to build and operate.
Systems
Automation
Platform
Reliability
What comes next
Building toward platform and site reliability engineering.
This site documents that progression honestly: the architecture, implementation, failures, recoveries, and decisions behind the finished systems.