Old-school engineer. Three decades: U.S. Navy, Microsoft, Amazon/AWS, and ServiceNow. Building and operating Internet systems at planetary scale. Opinions are my own; nothing here is professional advice.

👋 Hello! I’m Tom

Old-school engineer — three decades across the U.S. Navy, Microsoft, Amazon/AWS, and now ServiceNow, building and operating Internet systems at planetary scale.

This is my public notebook: system architecture, security and identity, trading systems, and whatever rabbit hole I’ve fallen into.

Opinions are my own and do not represent my employer, past or present. Nothing here is professional advice.

I architect systems that span the entire stack — from network infrastructure and authentication to deployment pipelines and production observability.

🛠️ Core Expertise

AWS Kubernetes DNS Docker Python C# TypeScript

  • Infrastructure: AWS, Bare-Metal, Kubernetes, Docker, Ansible
  • Security & Identity: Active Directory, SAML, OIDC, MFA, RADIUS
  • Programming & Frameworks: Python, C#, TypeScript, Go, Ruby, Java | .NET/ASP.NET, Django, py4web, Vue.js, FastAPI
  • Observability: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Graphite, Distributed Tracing
  • Networking & Protocols: DNS, Load Balancing, Traffic Shaping, TCP/IP, HTTP/HTTPS, TLS/SSL, VPN, Network Architecture, Distributed Systems

🚀 Featured Project: Market Data Platform

My pinned repositories showcase a distributed real-time market data system I built from scratch after leaving Amazon—a production-grade platform processing 1,000+ events/second:

📖 Read the full documentation → Architecture, module references, contribution guide, security policy, and detailed changelog — because real engineering projects have real documentation.

Blog Posts: All of my blog posts related to Kuhl Haus MDP are tagged with #kuhl-haus-mdp. You can find them all here: https://oldschool-engineer.dev/tags/#kuhl-haus-mdp, in reverse chronological order.

Repository Description
kuhl-haus-mdp Core market data processing library
kuhl-haus-mdp-servers Backend microservices
kuhl-haus-mdp-app Frontend & service control plane
kuhl-haus-mdp-deployment Kubernetes & Ansible automation

Tech stack: Kubernetes • Redis • RabbitMQ • FastAPI • py4web • OpenTelemetry

🏠 Kuhl Haus Organization

Kuhl Haus is my open-source organization dedicated to transforming practical home automation and infrastructure projects into community tools. What started as building a robust home lab has evolved into a collection of MIT-licensed packages available on GitHub.

Philosophy: Ship production-quality code with comprehensive tests, documentation, and real-world application examples. Every project includes CI/CD pipelines, code coverage, and security scanning.

Active Projects: Stock market data processing platform (Kuhl Haus MDP) and a site monitoring service named “Magpie”.

😄 Side Project: Random Dad Jokes

Sometimes the best way to learn is to build something fun. ur.janky.click is a single-page dad joke app I built in an hour—100% HTML, GitHub Pages hosting, custom domain, API integration, and zero JavaScript frameworks. It’s a practical demonstration of how far you can go with intentional simplicity. Read about the build process and technical choices that made it possible.

📝 Technical Writing

I document my engineering journey on my blog at oldschool-engineer.dev and I use Medium as a distribution channel under a custom domain at the.oldschool.engineer.

💡 What Drives Me

I believe in intentional simplicity—building systems that solve real problems without over-engineering. Check out this post-mortem for an example of how I approach debugging and quality.

🤔 Why “oldschool-engineer”?

oldschool-engineer wasn’t a name I picked — it was given to me. I was leading an engineering team in AWS EC2 when my team discovered I run what is, by any honest measure, a home data center — a 13-node Proxmox cluster in a 42U rack, triple-redundant Internet, and my own on-prem cloud. I gave a tech talk about it. When I got to the part about building my own certified 10Gbps ethernet cables from raw spools of CAT6A — measured, cut, terminated, tested, and dressed to spec — one of my engineers just stopped me:

“Whoa. You’re like a real, serious, ‘old school’ engineer. You were building Internet services before the cloud existed.”

The DNS domains were available. Done.

Damn right. I’m the Oldschool Engineer.

Yes, “oldschool-engineer,” “old school,” and “Oldschool” are all used differently here. Merriam-Webster says it should be “old-school,” but I’m a DNS nerd, not an English teacher. In a domain name, a hyphen or period naturally replaces a space — so “oldschool engineer” becomes oldschool-engineer.dev or oldschool.engineer and that’s perfectly clean. But follow Merriam-Webster’s hyphenation and you get old-school-engineer.dev or old-school.engineer — and nobody wants to live with that. So “oldschool” it is. Roll with it.

This is my public notebook. If any of this is your world too — let’s talk shop.