Mason Ball · Director of IT · St. George, Utah
I’m a hands-on IT director and infrastructure engineer based in St. George, Utah.
I lead day-to-day technology operations while still working directly with Linux, Kubernetes, virtualization, networking, automation, and recovery. I care about systems that can be understood and trusted by the people responsible for them. That means documenting the work, testing the dangerous parts, and designing changes with a real rollback path.
I’m looking to bring that mix of technical depth and operational leadership into a senior infrastructure, platform engineering, or DevOps role.
Technical areas I operate across, from server infrastructure to delivery pipelines.
Server builds, hardening, performance, and troubleshooting — the base layer everything else here stands on.
Cluster operations, workload packaging, storage, and gateway routing, expressed declaratively wherever possible.
Hypervisor and virtual machine lifecycle management, run alongside containers where each fits best.
Routing, name resolution, and certificate lifecycles treated as first-class, documented infrastructure.
Infrastructure as reviewable code: pull requests, schema validation, and automated checks before anything merges.
Metrics, logs, and alerting designed to surface issues early and support faster diagnosis.
Backup schedules, retention, and restore testing treated as one recovery discipline.
Owning IT operations end to end: planning, prioritization, incident response, and clear communication.
Case studies from infrastructure work and open-source project leadership, focused on decisions, controls, and verifiable outcomes.
Explore Cairn: project website · source and roadmap.
I started Cairn for my children and lead its direction and AI-assisted development. The project has a working launcher and terminal integration, a public roadmap, and a live website. Permission hardening, recovery, and real-hardware validation remain release requirements; it is not yet ready for everyday child use.
A backup policy that existed only in a live Longhorn cluster, rebuilt as a reviewable GitOps artifact with schema validation, negative tests, and secret scanning.
Full case-study details load from portfolio.json.
I put operational configuration and procedures into reviewable source control so they can be understood, handed off, and changed deliberately.
Restore tests, automated checks, and written outcomes establish whether a system behaves as intended.
I prefer proven tools, minimal dependencies, and changes that can be reviewed and reversed without drama.
Technical evidence is sanitized deliberately so it demonstrates the work without exposing operational access or sensitive configuration.
I love turtles and tortoises, so when I briefly ran an IT installation business, Tortoise Tech was a natural name. I've since moved on from installation work, but kept the name and the little tortoise around. Today it's my personal brand and a home for my projects, with a nod to one of my favorite things outside of IT.