Hi, I'm Keith.
I'm an infrastructure engineer. I've spent decades working on projects on multiple continents managing dynamic infrastructure and helping others learn to do the same.
I like long walks down the hot aisle, PXE boot, all kinds of automation, and building rigorous systems that hopefully only break in expected ways. 3am slow reads through network topology charts? Don't threaten me with a good time.
I write quality code at a glacial pace, read log file tails for fun, and prefer "system administrator" to "devops" or "SRE."
I maintain a pretty nifty homelab that doubles as an AI research environment. I've been modelling sysadmin work patterns using coding agents (stay tuned for repos) and training small-scale models as learning projects.
What I'm building now
- Ornith ThinkingCap fine-tunes — I reproduced
BottleCap AI's ThinkingCap method (correctness-gated, length-penalized GRPO) on the
Ornith coding models to cut reasoning-token spend without losing accuracy. Trained on
my own DGX Spark (GB10).
Ornith-1.0-9B-ThinkingCap— −29% total tokens, −74% on math, accuracy held or improvedOrnith-1.0-35B-ThinkingCap— the MoE version, +6 pts on GSM8K at −24% tokens, zero code regression
- A homelab that's really an AI-infra lab — local LLM serving (vLLM), a from-scratch benchmark harness for perf/tool-calling/quality, log aggregation feeding an ML pipeline, all provisioned as code (Terraform on Proxmox + Ansible).
Where I've been
- Dell - (2012-2015) - high-touch services and support for Enstratius (acquired by Dell), then served as internal DevOps evangelist for Dell Software Group.
- Docker (2016–2020) - storage & security partner enablement; I owned the "Docker
Certified" stamp for storage and security partners back when Docker was still an infrastructure
company. Built the conformance tooling that started as
vol-testand grew into a Go suite exercising Kubernetes CSI storage plugins end-to-end. - PagerDuty - I've lived in both pre- and post-sales roles covering both PagerDuty and Rundeck product families. Currently I'm embedded with several customers as a technical account manager.
- Deep background in managing storage, virtualization, and keeping distributed systems honest.
📫 Elsewhere
- 🤗 Hugging Face: @khudgins
- 🌐 greenman.org