Joe Hernandez
I've spent 7+ years across regulated and high-growth environments (financial services, medical devices, enterprise SaaS), owning cloud infrastructure across 120+ production services, incident response, and the automation that removes human error from the loop. I'm a Senior Site Reliability Engineer and software developer who's just as comfortable diving into system architectures as writing tools in Go, building Next.js apps, or crafting Flutter mobile experiences.
About Me
I'm Joe. Born in California, living in Minnesota. As a kid, I took apart anything electronic I could get my hands on. My parents weren't thrilled, but I had to know how things worked. That curiosity stuck around.
When the iPhone came out, I taught myself Objective-C to build apps. Then HTML, CSS, JavaScript. Over the years I've built backend services with Java, web apps with Next.js, mobile apps with Flutter. I keep coming back to building software because I genuinely enjoy it.
Moving into Site Reliability Engineering made sense. I was already writing code, so why not focus on keeping it running well? I've built cloud environments from scratch, including migrating a platform generating tens of millions in annual revenue off legacy infrastructure, and standing up shared Kubernetes platforms that let multiple teams ship faster. There's something satisfying about fixing a problem once and making sure it doesn't happen again. See my Projects page for the full stories.
The best thing about SRE is that it's not just technical. It's about working with people and building processes that actually work. Since I still write code regularly, I understand what developers deal with. That perspective helps me do my job better.
Latest Posts
Thoughts on SRE, AI, career, and whatever else is on my mind.
What I Love Working With
Here are the tools, practices, and concepts that get me excited about SRE work:
- 🤖 Automation: Turning repetitive tasks into code so humans can focus on interesting problems
- ☁️ Azure: Building scalable solutions with Azure's enterprise-grade cloud platform and services
- 🏗️ Terraform: Infrastructure as code to build, change, and version cloud and on-prem infrastructure safely
- ⚙️ PowerShell: Automating Windows environments, Azure management, and complex deployment workflows
- 🐳 Kubernetes: Orchestrating containerized applications at scale with proper reliability patterns
- 🔧 Performance: The fascinating challenge of making systems fast, efficient, and predictable
Development Passion
Beyond the reliability side, I genuinely love building things! There's something magical about turning ideas into working software, and I'm always exploring new technologies and frameworks:
- ⚛️ Next.js & React: Love the developer experience and how quickly you can build modern web apps
- 🐹 Go (Golang): Perfect for building reliable backend services, CLI tools, and anything that needs to be fast and concurrent
- 📱 Flutter: Cross-platform mobile development that actually works well - the hot reload is addictive!
- 🌐 Full-stack Projects: Connecting databases, APIs, and frontends into cohesive applications
- 🛠️ Developer Tools: Building utilities and scripts that make other developers' lives easier
Let's Connect
Feel free to reach out! You can email me at [email protected] or connect with me on LinkedIn. Interested in discussing opportunities, consulting projects, or collaborating on interesting engineering challenges.