Talks, podcasts,
and press.

Open to speaking and podcast invitations on AI infrastructure, agentic ops, the autonomy ladder, RAG architecture, cloud modernization, and the pattern of bridging older infrastructure to newer ones.

Topics

What we like to talk about.

These are the angles we have working material on, drawn from the writing at Cookies Cookie Settings Echoes of the Machine and from live engagements. Happy to tailor any of these for a specific audience.

Talk · 01

The autonomy ladder, and what changes at each rung

From "suggest" to "execute with confirmation" to "bounded autonomy." What gates have to be in place, what breaks first, and why the jump from Tier 2 to Tier 3 is the steepest cliff in agentic systems.

Talk · 02

Prompts as code, evals as CI

The most-edited surface in an AI product has been managed like a wiki page. What it looks like when you give it the same git, CI, feature-flag, and rollback discipline as everything else.

Talk · 03

The AWS-native shape that actually ships

The minimum cloud architecture for a serious AI product. API Gateway, Lambda, Cognito, RDS+pgvector, Bedrock: what it costs, what it scales to, what to add next.

Talk · 04

Local-first AI: when the desk beats the cloud

Apple Silicon, mflux, ollama, the hybrid split. Why customer-facing belongs in the cloud and training/batch/eval belongs on the desk. Plus the math that supports it.

Talk · 05

Bridging eras: from vRA to agentic ops

The instincts that built vRealize Automation are the same instincts that build agent crews. What carries across, what doesn't, and what the IaC era can teach the agentic era.

Talk · 06

Right-sized: enterprise craft for small orgs

The patterns that worked for the Fortune 100 work at scale-1 too. They just need translation. The case for bringing real infrastructure to the orgs the hyperscalers ignore.

Recent & upcoming.

Recorded talks, podcast appearances, panel discussions, and press mentions. New ones are added as they happen.

Upcoming

Available for podcasts & conferences

Open to invitations on any of the topics above. Remote-friendly. Will travel for the right room.

Contactcontact form · note "speaking" in the topic field

Archive · pre-Privian

VMware / vRA conference circuit

As National Cloud Specialist at VMware and Office of the CTO at CloudBolt, gave dozens of talks on infrastructure-as-code, cloud automation, and platform engineering across Fortune 100 customer conferences.

TopicsIaC patterns · self-service cloud · CI/CD at platform scale · multi-cloud governance

Published

Echoes of the Machine: long-form writing

The blog is the public version of the engineering practice. Practitioner-level posts on AI infrastructure, agentic ops, retrieval, evals, cloud, and looking-back essays on older tech.

Available

Press inquiries

Happy to talk to journalists working on AI infrastructure, the gap between AI hype and AI engineering, regional tech communities, or the hyperscaler / small-org access divide. On the record, off the record, or background. Your call.

Contactcontact form · note "press" in the topic field

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