Building reliable systems in complex environments

Automation and developer tooling designed to reduce friction and improve delivery confidence.

Ben Pavey

About Me

Iā€™m a Software Engineer focused on developer experience and engineering effectiveness.

I build reliable, security-minded systems and workflows that help teams get productive quickly in complex organisations.

My work focuses on reducing friction through automation, simplifying workflows where it genuinely adds value, and building tooling that scales without increasing support overhead.

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Systems & Automation

Platforms, Identity & Infrastructure

Reliability & Quality

Enablement & Knowledge Sharing

Projects

Personal systems and experiments used to explore ideas, pressure-test approaches, and build engineering judgment in an open environment. These are deliberately small, hands-on personal projects.

Local LLM System

An exploration of running local, private language models by composing existing tools (open-source tooling and local model runtimes) into a usable system. Focused on trade-offs around privacy, usability, and developer workflows rather than model training.

What this taught me: Most value comes from system design and constraints, not from building models from scratch.

Automated Quality Checks for a Production Web Page

End-to-end and CI-driven checks for this site, used to validate testing approaches, CI feedback loops, and maintain confidence in a small production system.

What this taught me: Fast, reliable feedback loops matter more than test volume.

Deployed

CI/CD System Experiments

Small experiments exploring CI/CD patterns, automation boundaries, and failure modes, used to reason about pipeline design rather than showcase a specific toolchain.

What this taught me: Simple pipelines with clear failure modes outperform complex, clever ones.

Articles & Guides

I write plain-English technical guides and practical notes on building reliable systems, reducing operational friction, and improving developer workflows. Most writing lives on Substack.

Featured: Django Baseplate ā€” Why I Built It

Lessons from building a production-ready Django template with deployment, security, and performance in mind.

Read on Substack

Contact

For professional enquiries, email is the best way to reach me. I review messages selectively ā€” brief context is appreciated.