My name is Paul Rudnitskiy and this is my personal blog. Computers always fascinating me, their flexibility and complexity, the things you can achieve with those cold lifeless pieces of silicon. I started to work as a computer technician in 2001, first as a system administrator but tried many infrastructure-related roles – DC technician, system administrator, network engineer, and even a part-time programmer. Later I switched to DevOps and nowadays I’m doing SRE and tech lead roles. I mostly work with Unix systems, Debian Linux is the most common OS I work with. I do not work with Microsoft products and Microsoft Windows specifically. You can find my full professional biography on LinkedIN.

This blog is mostly used to write about problems I fight and how I fix them, to help people struggling with the same problems. I strongly believe useful information must be free, and if any of my articles helps somebody, it will not fail in vain.

For the last 8 years I have helped people to build and fix safe, reliable and performant systems so people can share their work and the infrastructure would not be a problem. It just exists and does not require any special attention from people who use it, like water pipes and electricity. To do so I design systems top-down and bottom-up, utilising modern tools as well as old approaches and common sense. I use observability (I’m a strong fan of it and started to use it even before this word became popular) to gather usage stats and optimize systems based on it. In most cases, it helps, but sometimes only new hardware will help.

What is important is I strongly believe in simple solutions. It is easy to create complexity but hard to make something simple. Complexity has a price and this price is not always visible until it is too late.

I also code in Python and Go but mostly for personal projects and internal tools. I plan to code more as it is a basic skill for modern infrastructure engineers, no matter what you call them.

I’m happy to help if you need infrastructure-related advice or external expertise, feel free to mail me.

If you have a professional opinion – I’m happy to discuss it as well. You can find a mail above.

I strongly believe that every little effort counts, especially when they’re combined. Ideas are not like apples: you’ll have an apple and I would have an apple if I give you one and you give me one. If we do the same exchange of ideas - we both have two ideas.

By the way, this how I look like.