Ryan Tomlinson

Trail Grazer Photo Gallery

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Trail Grazer Photo is a custom photo gallery I use to share some of the photos I’ve taken.

It is served as a static site via S3 and CloudFront. The site is built using Nuxt and fully automated through a CI pipeline on my local Forgejo runner. Photos are stored in S3. When new photos are added to the bucket, a Lambda job automatically generates thumbnails and extracts EXIF data. AWS infrastructure and CloudFlare DNS are managed as code using OpenTofu.

Gittin' Out of Trouble

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Git is one of those tools where you can get by on a surprisingly small set of commands most of the time, and then occasionally find yourself in a situation where you’re not sure what state anything is in or how to get back to somewhere safe. This is a reference for both of those scenarios.

The Basics

The commands I use most often, roughly in order of frequency:

git status
git add <file>
git add -p
git commit -m "message"
git push
git pull
git log --oneline
git log --oneline --graph
git diff
git diff --staged
git stash
git stash pop

git add -p lets you stage changes interactively, hunk by hunk. This is helpful when you make several unrelated changes to a file and want to split them across commits.

Platform Foundations

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Writing a DNS Client

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a series, Byte-Sized Go, in which I tackle mini-projects related to network programming in Go.

Introduction

As part of another project, I was wanting to implement a simple DNS server from scratch. I decided to write a simple client first as a way to work out the basic shapes I would need for the server (parsing flag bits in the header, reading/writing bytes over the wire and encoding/decoding them into Go structs). Working through this project ended up being even more enlightening than I expected. Many of the pieces of DNS I had taken for granted or completely overlooked stood out in a new light.

Byte-Sized Go

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Automating Arch Linux with Ansible

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a quick writeup for arch-btw, an Ansible project I use to manage the configuration of my Arch Linux workstations.

Introduction

A while back, I decided to take the plunge and install Arch Linux on my main PC. After leaving Windows for GNU/Linux a couple years ago, I bounced around between a few different Linux distros. Ultimately, my decision to move to Arch came down to two main reasons:

Frustration with the bloat included in most distros
Wanting to learn Linux a little closer to the metal

I don’t mean for this to be a jab at any specific distribution, so I’m not going to mention any. I don’t think any major distribution is “bad” at all. In fact, I’m pretty amazed at how many features their developers are able to pack into them. I just reached a point where I wanted more control over my operating system and the experience of customizing it to be exactly what I want (and nothing more.)

Workstation Automation

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Because life’s too short to reconfigure your terminal by hand every time you switch machines. This is the umbrella for everything that keeps my development environment consistent, automated, and exactly how I like it — wherever I’m working.

World Info

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a simple frontend web project which started as an Angular app for one of my classes in college. I later rewrote it in Vue and deployed it to my personal site via AWS S3 and CloudFront.

Functionality was inconsistent but mostly working when I last checked. Maintaining this page isn’t very high priority for me, but I’ll likely try to fix it up at some point, especially if it breaks completely.

Oats

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Oats: One-at-a-Time To-Do’s

I started this project pretty early into my Go journey as a somewhat practical toy project. I still like the concept, but have found other organizational habits that work better for me (mainly a rough GTD implementation in Joplin).

It covers:

Data persistence with SQLite
Command line options with Cobra
XDG directory standards

Source: GitHub

About Me

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a platform engineer and software developer interested in the systems that other systems run on: infrastructure automation, distributed systems, container orchestration, and the tooling that makes all of it more reliable and observable.

I like working close to the metal. Right now that means building a distributed systems playground in Go: a custom DNS implementation, a distributed key-value store, a container runtime, a chaos injection layer, and a custom observability platform, all wired together and exposed through a relay on AWS so the whole system is visible from the internet.