I've been working mostly on Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, IAM, observability, and security-heavy platform work.
I started out doing full-stack web development back in the pre-git, pre-modern-framework era, building e-commerce sites in ASP.NET and PHP. These days I mostly build and operate systems, automate everything I can, and spend time tuning shells, CLIs, homelabs, and AI-assisted workflows.
- 🌍 Based in Santa Cruz, California, working fully remote
- 🥰 My pronouns: he/they
- 📫 Reach me at emlynstokes@gmail.com
✈️ I'm passionate about traveling. I recently lived in Iceland for 6 months.
- Platform and SRE work across AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, GitOps, and CI/CD
- Reliability, observability, logging, incident response, production readiness, and disaster recovery
- Security and compliance work in regulated environments: IAM, encryption, FedRAMP, SOC 2, NIST/CIS/FIPS controls
- API gateway, ingress, service mesh, identity, and traffic management patterns
- Team leadership / project and people management
- AI tooling, sandboxed agent workflows, prompt-driven automation, and developer workflow experiments
- Building and refining Kubernetes platforms across GKE and K3s
- Working on AWS to GCP migration efforts, DR planning, and multi-region architecture
- Building reverse proxy and customer-domain patterns with Istio, cert-manager, Let's Encrypt, External Secrets, and Kyverno
- Running a 5-node homelab with K3s, ArgoCD, Tailscale, Cloudflare, Authentik, and many self-hosted services
- Doing a lot of AI-assisted and mildly vibe-coded side projects: CLI tools, full-stack web apps, desktop and mobile experiments.
Cloud / Platform
AWS, GCP, Azure, Digital Ocean, VPSs, Kubernetes, GKE, K3s, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, Linux
GitOps / CI/CD
ArgoCD, Helmfile, GitHub Actions, Buildkite, GitLab CI, Renovate
Security / IAM / Compliance
OIDC, Workload Identity Federation, IAM, KMS, Okta, OAuth 2.0, JWT, SSL/TLS, FedRAMP, SOC 2, NIST, CIS, FIPS
Observability / Logging / Reliability
Datadog, New Relic, Elasticsearch, ELK, centralized logging, tracing, alerting, SLOs, incident response, runbooks
Cloud Services
EC2, ELB, ALB, NLB, S3, CloudFront, Route53, Lambda, DynamoDB, RDS, SQS, SNS, Secret Manager, Artifact Registry, Cloud Armor, Cloud CDN
Platform Components
Istio, Kong, cert-manager, External Secrets, ExternalDNS, Kyverno, Caddy, Tailscale, Cloudflare
Languages
Python, Go, Rust, Bash, Zsh, SQL, JavaScript, PHP, Swift
Web / Data / App Stack
PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, WordPress, Drupal, Apache, Nginx, IIS, REST APIs, e-commerce systems
Tooling / Developer Environment
chezmoi, mise, nix, WSL2, Neovim
My GitHub Stats