Stylized portrait illustration of TechDufus
Platform Engineer / Agentic Engineer

About

Hello, I'm TechDufus.

You can call me Dufus.

I'm Matthew, but most people online know me as TechDufus. I started in PowerShell, then moved into Kubernetes platform work, and now I spend a lot of time sharpening agentic workflows.

I build platform systems, tinker in my homelab, and share what actually worked.

Status: probably fighting DNS somewhere.

The Backstory (Short Version)

I found PowerShell, caught the automation bug, and realized I could make a career out of being lazy in the best way: automate it.

When I found PowerShell, I got bit by the automation bug and realized I could make a career out of being lazy in the best way: automate it once and stop doing it by hand. AdminToolkit and HelpDesk were two of the first tools I built for day-to-day work.

That push toward automation pulled me into the DevOps world, which came with a whole new toolchain and a whole new set of problems to solve across Terraform, GitOps, and Kubernetes.

As a DevOps engineer, I realized one of my biggest gaps was empathy for the developer workflows I was shaping. I was blessed to step into a full-stack role where we owned the entire microservices stack end to end: app code, tests, CI/CD, container registry, cloud Kubernetes, security controls, firewalls, backups, and VPN.

As I grew, that pulled me into platform engineering, where I do not just own CI/CD, I own the platform it deploys to. That means large Kubernetes clusters, RBAC at scale, and high-security air-gapped environments, while pushing AI at the edge of what agentic engineering can do.

This site is where I keep notes while details are fresh: what broke, what held, and what I would change next round.

How I Operate

How I keep speed without losing control.

Reproducible By Default

I treat environments as code. If I can hand Terraform a fresh Proxmox box and rebuild the stack, I trust it.

Automate Early

If I cannot automate something from the start, I usually do not keep investing in it. One-off steps drift fast.

Fast Feedback, Guardrails On

I move fast with short loops, but risky changes still go through review rails, rollback planning, and verification.

No Tribal-Knowledge Ops

Any change that only lives in someone's memory is high risk. I prefer scripted workflows and written runbooks that survive handoffs.

Say Hey!

Seriously, please talk to me.

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