Welcome to the Personal Blog of Tom Wignall

Hello — I’m glad you’ve found your way here. This is my personal blog: a small, honest corner of the internet where I write about cloud infrastructure, homelabs, automation, and the occasional personal note about the life that makes all of that possible.

Why this blog?

I’m passionate about the craft of building and maintaining systems: designing resilient infrastructure, automating repetitive tasks, and tinkering in my homelab late into the evening. This blog is where I share that work, making my experiments, lessons, and ideas accessible to others.

What you’ll find here

  • Cloud infrastructure: Practical, opinionated posts about architecture, IaC (Infrastructure as Code), cost optimization, deployment patterns, and the trade-offs I encounter in real projects. Expect diagrams, commands, and real-world lessons rather than marketing fluff.

  • Homelab projects: Step-by-step write-ups of my home setups — storage, networking, virtualization, backups, and the occasional retro server rescue. I aim for reproducible guides but will also share the mistakes that taught me more than any success.

  • Automation: Scripts, workflows, and pragmatism. From simple cron jobs to GitOps practices and CI/CD pipelines, I’ll share automation that saves time and reduces human error.

  • Personal notes: Occasional posts about the mindset behind the work, career reflections, conference takeaways, or a day when nothing went according to plan. These human pieces are short, honest, and aimed at engineers who recognize the same small frustrations and joys.

Who this is for

  • Engineers building or maintaining infrastructure who want clear, practical guidance.

  • Hobbyists and homelabbers looking for realistic projects and setups.

  • Folks curious about automation and how it can make daily ops less painful.

  • Anyone who appreciates a down-to-earth approach — no gatekeeping, just useful stuff.

How I write

I favour clarity over cleverness. Each post aims to be actionable:

  • What I set out to do,
  • The tools and config I used,
  • What went wrong and why,
  • How you can reproduce or adapt it.

Commands, snippets, and configuration examples are common. I’ll keep things opinionated — because often the “right” choice depends on context — and I’ll explain why I chose one path over another.

A note on sharing and feedback

If you try something from the blog, I’d love to hear how it went. Corrections, alternative approaches, and questions are all welcome — they help make future posts better. If a guide saved you time or annoyed you, tell me; either way, it helps shape what comes next.

Join me

If you care about resilient systems, sensible automation, and the quiet pleasures of a well-tuned homelab, stick around. New posts will appear with guides, experiments, and the occasional reflection. Consider this the place where my work gets a little daylight.

Welcome to my blog — let’s make these ideas useful.