About Me

I'm Michael Fleming, the half-Irish Australian Zen Buddhist systems administrator, janitor and all-round cosmic foole in charge of ThatFlemingGent, formerly on a single old Athlon co-located server, now grown into a full Amazon account with all the trimmings (4 EC2 instances, a database, a cache, security checks and guardrails, even some monitoring - of course automated if not full GitOps)

I'm a Brisbane native, born in the inner-city suburb of Kangaroo Point in 1973  – the flood of 1974 may explain why I was a good swimmer as a kid.

I lived in Logan City for the first 25 years of my life (but aside friends who still live around the old neighborhood I have no real connections, the rest of my family having moved or sadly passed on) going to the local high schools then on to university, where after a year at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music I switched to a Bachelor of Education (Music Education and English double major) graduating in 1997.

I've been was a systems administrator / DevOps / architect / security wonk (the latter not by choice but necessity) for a good couple of decades now, getting into it after running some hobby servers during uni.

I've worked for Webcentral (a MelbourneIT company subsidiary for a while, how did being a glorified AWS reseller feel? Good to see you back), Pegasus/Dedicated Servers (gone and the former now a NextDC datacentre, ironic as the owners didn't always see eye to eye) , Australian Publishing Network (going BOFH on developers with too much time and too little managerial oversight - I learned a lot about change management and office politics aha). I worked as contracting scum at a few small places, mainly FinTech related as a consultant flexing my config management and automation / DevSecOps / Linux / architect skills)

Now I'm a senior AWS cloud ops engineer at Arup Group (consulting engineers - responsible for the Sydney Opera House) but as there's not many of us for a multinational company, I wear a few extra hats (architect / DevSecOps / Terraform and automation exemplar to name a few 😛)

See my LinkedIn profile for a fuller curriculum vitae. It's a longish read now (and I'll update it soon, it's been a while since I've had to update it)

I'm still a musician at heart even though I don't play as much as I used to. It's aa bit tricky practicing bass tuba in an apartment complex

I love a good read, an eclectic collection from Frank Herbert, Bruce Schneier, George Orwell, Isaac Asimov and many others populate my bookshelf. I might switch them to Kindle or some other medium - physical bookstores are becoming quaintly passe

Musically,I enjoy any good classical music of any era, modernish electronica – Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, The Chemical Brothers, Boards of Canada and Fatboy Slim being favourites (but not averse to old Kraftwerk / JMJ).

I game too – I'm an old school Ultima player, Eve Online tragic, a bit of a Final Fantasy player (but not a hardcore weeb, I don't play a catgirl / bunnyboi or potato it's too cringe sorry especially with some of the goofy names - a lalafel paladin named Blueberry Sweetroll is something I can't help but laugh with). I'm delving into retro these days - emulated Commodore 64 / Amiga games. Atari 8bit / 2600 and a bit of MAME for a quick blast

I can be contacted by email at mfleming@thatfleminggent.com. I'm on too much social media (not Elmo Musk's cringe site, and Zuck's knockoff of Twitter is cringe so I mainly shitpost on it) so if it's on my Socials page I'll see it and likely respond

Cheers,
Michael.

(cleaned up a bit for 2025!)