Nathaniel Ivry 🇸🇪

The Long Way Around

I spent my 20s and 30s training to become a commercial pilot. I earned my ATPL and CFA and learned what it means to operate inside safety-critical systems where mistakes compound quickly.

At 35, recurring kidney stones cost me my medical certification — and with it, my entire career.

After the loss, I rebuilt.

I installed Arch Linux, picked up Isaac Asimov, and started learning how computers actually work.

A web-focused bootcamp didn’t click. HTML and CSS felt like the surface of something much deeper.

Then I found CS50.

That’s where I realized programming isn’t about writing code — it’s about designing systems, reasoning about constraints, and making trade-offs under pressure.

When I finally solved Tideman after two weeks of failure, I knew I wasn’t just learning syntax. I was doing systems thinking again.

Why DevOps Fits Me

Aviation Trained Me for Operations Flying is systems engineering in real time: checklists, redundancy, failure modes, and calm decision-making when things don’t go as planned. DevOps felt familiar immediately — the same mindset, different machines.

Distributed Systems Felt Like Home I grew up on IRC, Usenet, and early online communities. Latency, partitions, and partial failure weren’t academic concepts — they were daily reality. That intuition shows up naturally in how I design software.

Rebuilding Taught Me Resilience Learning to program while managing chronic illness forced discipline, patience, and respect for limits. I don’t chase hype — I build things that last.

How I Think

“I’m a programmer who takes responsibility for systems after they’re deployed. If it runs in production, I want to understand it — and improve it.”

I respect frontend specialists and UI craftsmanship deeply. My strength is elsewhere: backend systems, infrastructure, and operational reliability.

What I Build and Operate

  • Backend services and APIs
  • Distributed and concurrent systems
  • Automation tooling and scripts
  • Production deployments and environments
  • Systems that fail predictably and recover cleanly

Tools & Stack

Primary: Go (concurrency & systems) Python (data & automation) Bash (glue & ops) Podman (containers & reproducibility)

Actively Learning: Distributed systems theory Service orchestration Observability and reliability patterns Infrastructure as code concepts

Where I’m Headed

I’m looking for junior DevOps, SRE, platform, or backend systems roles where:

  • Reliability matters
  • Curiosity is valued
  • Learning happens in production
  • Experience is measured in judgment, not years

I bring maturity, systems thinking, and respect for operational reality.

Connect

I’ve lost one career already. I know how to rebuild — and how to keep systems in the air.