Stack · Shirasaka Ren

the toolbox

Grouped by what breaks at 3AM. Search it, or pick the job you are hiring for and let the page do the matching — it knows the aliases, so “EKS” finds AWS and “incident response” finds the SRE half.

ask me about any of them

tools on the shelf

12categories
64daily drivers
116run in production
142real logos

219

hiring for

Daily driver: in my hands most weeks
Production experience: shipped it, ran it, been paged for it
Working knowledge: useful on day one, not day zero

Clouds

One landing-zone pattern each, zero snowflakes.

AWS
Daily driver
Google Cloud
Daily driver
Azure
Daily driver
Cloudflare
Daily driver
Huawei Cloud
Production experience
Alibaba Cloud
Production experience
Oracle Cloud
Production experience
IBM Cloud
Working knowledge
DigitalOcean
Production experience
OpenStack
Production experience

Containers & orchestration

I dream in YAML and argue with the scheduler at 3AM.

Kubernetes
Daily driver
Docker
Daily driver
Helm
Daily driver
Argo CD
Daily driver
Argo Rollouts
Production experience
Flux CD
Production experience
Kustomize
Daily driver
Podman
Production experience
containerd
Production experience
OpenShift
Production experience
Rancher
Production experience
Talos Linux
Production experience
Cluster API
Production experience
Karpenter
Production experience
KEDA
Production experience
Kyverno
Production experience
Knative
Working knowledge
Crossplane
Production experience
Anthos Service Mesh
Production experience
etcd
Production experience
k9s
Daily driver

Infrastructure as code & CI/CD

OpenTofu and Terraform — listing one is ideology, listing both is seniority.

Terraform
Daily driver
OpenTofu
Daily driver
Terragrunt
Production experience
Pulumi
Production experience
Ansible
Daily driver
Ansible AWX
Production experience
HashiCorp Consul
Daily driver
Packer
Production experience
Vagrant
Working knowledge
Nix / NixOS
Production experience
Chef
Working knowledge
Puppet
Working knowledge
Salt
Working knowledge
GitHub Actions
Daily driver
GitLab CI
Daily driver
Jenkins
Production experience
Tekton
Working knowledge
Dagger
Working knowledge
Cloud Build
Production experience
Backstage
Working knowledge
Atlantis
Production experience
Renovate
Production experience

Observability & SRE

Prometheus 3.x — native histograms, UTF-8 labels, OTLP receiver. I write histogram_quantile from memory.

Prometheus
Daily driver
Grafana
Daily driver
OpenTelemetry
Daily driver
Loki
Daily driver
Tempo
Production experience
Mimir
Production experience
Pyroscope
Working knowledge
Alloy
Production experience
Thanos
Production experience
VictoriaMetrics
Production experience
Jaeger
Production experience
Elasticsearch
Production experience
OpenSearch
Production experience
Kibana
Production experience
Fluent Bit
Production experience
Datadog
Production experience
New Relic
Working knowledge
Sentry
Production experience
Zabbix
Working knowledge
ClickHouse
Production experience
InfluxDB
Working knowledge
Netdata
Working knowledge
SLO / SLI & error budgets
Daily driver

Security

I attack my own infra before someone else volunteers. SELinux stays enforcing.

HashiCorp Vault
Daily driver
OpenBao
Production experience
SOPS + age
Production experience
Trivy
Daily driver
Falco
Production experience
Tetragon
Production experience
Semgrep
Production experience
Snyk
Production experience
SonarQube
Production experience
Sigstore cosign
Production experience
SLSA
Production experience
OPA / Rego
Production experience
Keycloak
Daily driver
Kali Linux
Production experience
Burp Suite
Production experience
Metasploit
Production experience
Nmap
Production experience
Wireshark
Production experience
BloodHound
Working knowledge
Prowler
Production experience
kube-bench
Production experience
OWASP
Production experience
YubiKey
Daily driver
SIEM & SOAR
Production experience
CIS · ISO 27001 · SOC 2
Production experience

Networking & mesh

It's not DNS · there's no way it's DNS · it was DNS.

Cilium eBPF
Daily driver
Hubble
Production experience
Gateway API
Production experience
Istio
Production experience
Linkerd
Working knowledge
Envoy
Production experience
NGINX
Daily driver
Traefik
Production experience
HAProxy
Production experience
Kong
Working knowledge
WireGuard
Daily driver
Tailscale
Daily driver
cert-manager
Daily driver
nftables
Production experience
VLAN & L2/L3 routing
Daily driver
DNS
Daily driver

Data & streaming

PostgreSQL is my one true database — I tune autovacuum recreationally.

PostgreSQL
Daily driver
CloudNativePG
Production experience
MySQL
Production experience
MariaDB
Production experience
MongoDB
Production experience
Redis
Daily driver
Valkey
Production experience
Cassandra
Working knowledge
DynamoDB
Production experience
DuckDB
Working knowledge
Apache Kafka
Production experience
Redpanda
Working knowledge
RabbitMQ
Production experience
Apache Pulsar
Working knowledge
NATS JetStream
Production experience
Debezium
Working knowledge
BullMQ
Production experience
Meilisearch
Production experience
MinIO
Daily driver
Ceph
Working knowledge
BigQuery
Production experience

Load & performance

Plain wrk lies to you — coordinated omission is real, use wrk2.

k6
Daily driver
Locust
Production experience
Gatling
Working knowledge
JMeter
Production experience
Vegeta
Production experience
wrk2
Daily driver
fio
Production experience
iperf3
Production experience
perf + FlameGraph
Production experience
pgbench
Production experience

Languages

Bash starts with set -euo pipefail on line one. Always.

Python
Daily driver
Go
Daily driver
Bash
Daily driver
TypeScript
Daily driver
JavaScript
Daily driver
Rust
Production experience
C
Production experience
C++
Production experience
C#
Production experience
Java
Production experience
HCL
Daily driver
PromQL
Daily driver
Rego
Production experience
SQL
Daily driver
Lua
Production experience
PowerShell
Production experience
Ruby
Working knowledge
PHP
Working knowledge
Kotlin
Working knowledge
Scala
Working knowledge
Elixir
Working knowledge
Zig
Working knowledge
Perl
Working knowledge
Haskell
Working knowledge
R
Working knowledge
Dart
Working knowledge
Swift
Working knowledge
Nix
Production experience
CUE
Working knowledge
Assembly
Working knowledge

Apps I actually shipped

Infrastructure is nicer when you've had to run the thing on top of it.

Next.js
Daily driver
React
Daily driver
NestJS
Production experience
Prisma
Production experience
Tailwind CSS
Daily driver
Socket.IO
Production experience
LiveKit
Production experience
Yjs
Production experience
GraphQL
Production experience
Unity
Production experience
Unreal Engine
Working knowledge
WebGL / GLSL
Production experience
OpenAI API
Production experience

Operating systems

Shell: zsh + starship + tmux + nvim. Theme: pink, obviously.

Arch Linux
Daily driver
Debian
Daily driver
Ubuntu
Daily driver
RHEL
Daily driver
Fedora
Production experience
Gentoo
Working knowledge
NixOS
Production experience
Talos Linux
Production experience
macOS
Daily driver
Windows Server
under protest
Production experience
Proxmox VE
Daily driver
QEMU / KVM
Production experience
Neovim
Daily driver
tmux
Daily driver
Git
Daily driver
SELinux
Production experience

Physical & data centre

The layer most platform engineers have never touched. I have racked it.

Data centre architecture
Daily driver
Rack & stack
Daily driver
A+B redundant power
Daily driver
HVAC & thermal
Daily driver
MEP engineering
Production experience
Structured cabling
Daily driver
Fire & life safety
Production experience
Physical security
Production experience
Site development
Production experience
Construction management
Production experience
Capacity planning
Daily driver
FinOps
Daily driver

☁️Clouds

⎈Containers & orchestration

🏗️Infrastructure as code & CI/CD

📊Observability & SRE

🛡️Security

🕸️Networking & mesh

🗄️Data & streaming

🏎️Load & performance

💻Languages

⚛️Apps I actually shipped

🐧Operating systems

🏢Physical & data centre