I'm a software engineer in Philadelphia who spent ten years keeping production infrastructure running before moving into software. I bring an operator's instinct to code: I care about correctness, testability, and systems that don't page someone at 3am. These days I'm focused on building reliable software—establishing test suites, modernizing legacy codebases, and applying the same rigor I brought to infrastructure to the software that runs on top of it. That includes code written with AI help: it gets the same tests, review, and recorded design decisions as anything else.
- Reliability is a feature: systems shouldn't need heroics to operate
- Automation must reduce risk, not create it
- Modernize incrementally: improve what exists before reaching for a rewrite
- Governance should enable engineers: make the compliant path the easiest path
- Testing comes before trust: confidence comes from evidence, not familiarity
- Documentation is engineering work
More on each, with examples: jacksonasmith.com/principles
- Python, PowerShell, Ruby, Bash
- Test suite development & code modernization (Pester)
- CI quality gates with GitHub Actions
- REST API integration: Microsoft Graph, GitHub Enterprise, Entra ID
- AI-assisted development that stays test-gated and reviewed (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot custom instructions)
- Local models through Ollama (Qwen, DeepSeek)
- Azure, AWS, VMware vSphere
- Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Ansible)
- High-availability architecture & disaster recovery
- New Relic, Zabbix, Prometheus
- OpenTelemetry instrumentation
- Linux/Windows server architecture
- SQL Server clustering & availability groups
- Zero Trust deployment & PKI management
- Bringing test coverage and CI quality gates to existing codebases
- Reliable, unattended API integrations: Microsoft Graph, GitHub, identity platforms
- GitHub governance and security baselines that don't slow teams down
- AI-assisted development with explicit research, planning, and review checkpoints
- Built an internal PowerShell standard library for a four-engineer team, now used in 24 production scripts (47 call sites) in its first repository, with shared test infrastructure and CI
- Stood up the first Pester test suite and CI quality gates for an existing codebase; the tests caught a latent production bug during refactoring
- Re-platformed a GitHub Enterprise billing ETL pipeline from PowerShell to Python so the data team could read, maintain, and extend it in their own stack
- Moved shared mail delivery to the Microsoft Graph API, retiring legacy SMTP dependencies
- Part of the operations team that took a 1,200-server hybrid platform from 40–60% to 99.99% availability; I owned monitoring, automation, and three VMware datacenters
- Eliminated $400K+ in annual outsourcing costs and cut monthly vulnerability exposure 70% with an automated patching pipeline
Context for each number: jacksonasmith.com/experience
A read-only gh extension that reports where your GitHub repositories drift from a tiered security baseline you declare once, in a file: branch rulesets, where required checks may come from, secret scanning, action pinning, and workflows that still reference secrets long after a repo went quiet. Anything the API won't show is reported as unknown, never pass. Written in Go with only the standard library. Read the case study →
gh extension install jackson-asmith/gh-baselinePowerShell modules for unattended automation, CI-tested on Windows PowerShell 5.1 and PowerShell 7: bounded HTTP retries and Graph-first mail that won't resend after an ambiguous failure. Read the case study →
Modular Bash pipeline that bootstraps RHEL hosts into Active Directory and Red Hat Satellite: SSH, firewall, and audit hardening, Kerberos/SSSD domain join, and a self-healing domain rejoin. Every stage supports dry-run mode and is covered by bats tests and ShellCheck in CI.
Scheduled GitHub Actions workflow that monitors this domain's SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records and commits only when something actually changes. Read the case study →
When I'm not in the command line, I'm:
- Suffering Scuderia Ferrari fan (yes, that kind of reliability engineering)
- Chasing powder on the slopes
- Finding zen through yoga
- Reading everything from sci-fi to philosophy
- Exploring trails around Philly and beyond
- Website: jacksonasmith.com, including projects & case studies and my full experience
- Email: jackson@jacksonasmith.com
- LinkedIn: jackson-a-smith
- Location: Philadelphia, PA
- Let's talk about: distributed systems, Ferrari's pitwall calls, ski recommendations, book swaps, or hiking trails