If someone asks what I do, I usually say: “If it’s a rock that’s been mined, electrocuted, taught math, then with math — taught language, I probably work with it in some way.” That tends to either land well or end the conversation, which is a reasonable filter.
More specifically: I’m a Principal Quality Engineer and Test Architect. For the past several years I’ve been embedded in enterprise software delivery — event-driven architecture, Kafka, AWS, CI/CD — making sure software ships in a state people can actually use. The quality engineering title sounds narrow. It isn’t. You end up at every table, which means you end up knowing how every part breaks.
I’ve been taking things apart for thirty-plus years. Hardware first, then software, now both at the same time — I solder and I code, sometimes in the same afternoon. Understanding how something works is step one. Understanding how it fails is the part that’s actually useful.
Most of my experimentation happens at home on a Proxmox cluster running a couple dozen containers and VMs — GitLab, Mattermost, Home Assistant, OpenWebUI, and a handful of things I built myself. I run local LLMs on a GPU server in the house. If I can’t walk up and unplug it, I try not to depend on it.
I run a private Ultima Online shard. UO is a 1997 MMORPG that a small, stubborn community still runs on open-source server software. It’s more of a software project than a game at this point — custom mechanics, tooling, infrastructure. It got out of hand. I’m fine with that.
Dad in Albuquerque. My free time is finite and I’m careful with it. If I’m building something, it’s because it solves a real problem or because I couldn’t stop thinking about why it wasn’t built yet.
Code is on GitHub. If you want to get in touch: leon@leonrlewis.com.