Tom with puppy Essie on his shoulder

#opentowork (linkedin.com)

Tom's latest updates/adventures/projects. 

I'm using this space to talk about some of the self-directed learning projects I've taken on to help retool my skillset from traditional sysadmin approaches to a more modern DevOps/GitOps approach.

Pictured: my dog, Essie, as a puppy, when she would sometimes climb up to my shoulder. 🐶

Latest

generic chat bubbles

Building a content-aware AI chatbot

23 November 2025
Building a RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) AI chatbot that knows my site content and can talk specifically about it without hallucinations.
email authentication flow

Email Authentication for Any Domain

26 September 2025
(From March 2023) How I fully configured email authentication for sending (DMARC, DKIM, SPF) and receiving (TLSRPT, MTA-STS) for my vanity domain for reliable deliverability.
GitOps workflow

GitOps Automated Observability Stack

26 September 2025
Taking Infrastructure-as-Code to the next level with a full GitOps pipeline: using Terraform, Ansible and GitHub Actions to automate the entire infrastructure upon merging a code branch back to `main`.