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Intro #

HI! Welcome to my blog/portfolio…thing.

I’m a New York-based SRE and infrastructure engineer. Previously fullstack and ecommerce, now focused on Linux systems, Kubernetes, and building tooling that makes complex systems manageable.

What’s with the last name and the Chinese character? - the story is that the immigration officers could not pronouce my grandfather’s name, “任” - pronounced in Mandarin, “ruhn”. Hence…“ran”.

Yes, I’ve heard all of the jokes 😏

Professional Experience #

  • Ecommerce: inventory systems (SKU management and tracking), created APIs that helped shape user UX to increase sales (e.g.: quick-add items w/ only 6 left in stock to cart right before checkout), financial reports, UX adjustments to help sales productivity.
  • SRE: CI/CD pipelines for application deployments (emphasis on sub-10 minute recovery times for outages). Testing libraries and harnesses (this is BEFORE LLMs) Security audits (routed requests for PEN testers). Scaled deployments for applications (e.g.: goin from deploy once a month to multiple times a DAY), eventually scaling and standardizing practices across multiple teams and BUs.
  • Ops: Infrastructure A/B automations for 0-downtime cluster cutovers. AWS (cloudformation), Chef, Ansible, terraform; now ArgoCD and K8s. Implemented OTeL monitoring and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager). Outage triage, direction, RCA composition/writeups.
  • SWE: full-stack - front-end is admittedly my weakpoint (latest experience in TS React, Spotify backstage). Have written various applications to sensibly wrap all systems that I’ve worked on above, in a myriad of flavors (MVC monoliths, to microservice-based workflow systems).

Current focus: shared LLM memory/context architectures and GitOps pipelines for AI workloads.

The above is a very abbreviated splurge of my experience using and developing proprietary software! For more details, you’ll have to speak to me face-to-face ;)

Personal/FOSS Work #

Homelab & Infrastructure: I run a TalosOS Linux Kubernetes cluster on Raspberry Pi 5s, managing ~30 application services via ArgoCD GitOps. See my project entry on my homelab for more details!.

LLM Ops: Running local inference experiments with Qwen 3.6 models (llama.cpp vs vLLM), speculative decoding, and quantized MoE models on consumer hardware. This entire site was coded with qwen3.6-35b-a3b :D

Automation Tooling: Built nox-bot — a Go CLI for Telegram messaging, LLM-powered service reports, and homelab automation. Also maintain pinchscrape (OPML feed scraper) and various utility scripts (luks-utils).

Infrastructure as Code: Documented my Talos Linux + K8s homelab setup for others to replicate. Contributing to the Talos ecosystem through configuration examples and operational runbooks.

Open Source & Community: Arctic Code Vault Contributor - code archived at Svalbard. Pull Shark x3 (100+ PRs opened). Active contributor across Adobe, Behance, and Adobe Platform orgs on GitHub. I maintain helm-charts for any services that I self-host in my homelab!

Skills #

Infrastructure: Linux (RHEL, Debian, Alpine, Arch/CachyOS), Kubernetes, Talos Linux, Docker, Ansible, Terraform, Vault, Traefik, Longhorn, CNPG, NUT UPS, AWS

CI/CD & GitOps: GitHub Actions, Flux CD, Argo CD, Helm, Kustomize, Gitea

AI/ML Ops: llama.cpp, OpenAI-compatible APIs, speculative decoding, quantized MoE models, LLM-assisted development workflows

Languages: Go, Ruby, Bash, Python, TypeScript