👋 Hello! I’m Tom
Senior Engineering Technical Leader with 25+ years building and securing enterprise systems at Amazon/AWS and Microsoft, plus 10 years of U.S. Navy Signals Intelligence experience.
I architect systems that span the entire stack—from network infrastructure and authentication to deployment pipelines and production observability.
🛠️ Core Expertise
- Infrastructure: AWS, Bare-Metal, Kubernetes, Docker, Ansible
- Security & Identity: Active Directory, SAML, OIDC, MFA, RADIUS
- Programming & Frameworks: Python, C#, TypeScript, Go, Ruby, Java | .NET/ASP.NET, Django, py4web, Vue.js, FastAPI
- Observability: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Graphite, Distributed Tracing
- Networking & Protocols: DNS, Load Balancing, Traffic Shaping, TCP/IP, HTTP/HTTPS, TLS/SSL, VPN, Network Architecture, Distributed Systems
🚀 Featured Project: Market Data Platform
My pinned repositories showcase a distributed real-time market data system I built from scratch after leaving Amazon—a production-grade platform processing 1,000+ events/second:
📖 Read the full documentation → Architecture, module references, contribution guide, security policy, and detailed changelog — because real engineering projects have real documentation.
| Repository | Description |
|---|---|
| kuhl-haus-mdp | Core market data processing library |
| kuhl-haus-mdp-servers | Backend microservices |
| kuhl-haus-mdp-app | Frontend & service control plane |
| kuhl-haus-mdp-deployment | Kubernetes & Ansible automation |
Tech stack: Kubernetes • Redis • RabbitMQ • FastAPI • py4web • OpenTelemetry
🏠 Kuhl Haus Organization
Kuhl Haus is my open-source organization dedicated to transforming practical home automation and infrastructure projects into community tools. What started as building a robust home lab has evolved into a collection of MIT-licensed packages available on GitHub.
Philosophy: Ship production-quality code with comprehensive tests, documentation, and real-world application examples. Every project includes CI/CD pipelines, code coverage, and security scanning.
Active Projects: Stock market data processing platform (Kuhl Haus MDP) and a site monitoring service named “Magpie”.
😄 Side Project: Random Dad Jokes
Sometimes the best way to learn is to build something fun. ur.janky.click is a single-page dad joke app I built in an hour—100% HTML, GitHub Pages hosting, custom domain, API integration, and zero JavaScript frameworks. It’s a practical demonstration of how far you can go with intentional simplicity. Read about the build process and technical choices that made it possible.
📝 Technical Writing
I document my engineering journey on my blog at oldschool-engineer.dev and I use Medium as a distribution channel under a custom domain at the.oldschool.engineer.
- What I Built After Quitting Amazon — 5-part series on building production-grade distributed systems
- Why I’m moving my canonical content to a platform I own
- What’s this blog about?
💡 What Drives Me
I believe in intentional simplicity—building systems that solve real problems without over-engineering. Check out this post-mortem for an example of how I approach debugging and quality.
🤔 Why “oldschool-engineer”?
oldschool-engineer wasn’t a name I picked — it was given to me. I was leading an engineering team in AWS EC2 when my team discovered I run what is, by any honest measure, a home data center — a 13-node Proxmox cluster in a 42U rack, triple-redundant Internet, and my own on-prem cloud. I gave a tech talk about it. When I got to the part about building my own certified 10Gbps ethernet cables from raw spools of CAT6A — measured, cut, terminated, tested, and dressed to spec — one of my engineers just stopped me:
“Whoa. You’re like a real, serious, ‘old school’ engineer. You were building Internet services before the cloud existed.”
The DNS domains were available. Done.
Damn right. I’m the Oldschool Engineer.
Yes, “oldschool-engineer,” “old school,” and “Oldschool” are all used differently here.
Merriam-Webster says it should be “old-school,” but I’m a DNS nerd, not an English teacher.
In a domain name, a hyphen or period naturally replaces a space — so “oldschool engineer” becomes
oldschool-engineer.dev or oldschool.engineer and that’s perfectly clean. But follow Merriam-Webster’s
hyphenation and you get old-school-engineer.dev or old-school.engineer — and
nobody wants to live with that. So “oldschool” it is. Roll with it.
Looking for someone who can architect secure, scalable systems and ship production code? Let’s connect.