Harry Axford
IT Technician →Infrastructure →Reliability Engineering
By day I keep 1,000+ devices running across a multi-site school cluster. By night I build and operate Hanko, a production web platform with its own data pipeline, monitoring, and paying-customer infrastructure, all run solo. Long term I'm working toward engineering with AI; Hanko's cost-capped AI pipeline and the local-LLM homelab are the first rungs of that ladder.
IT Engineer · Systems Administrator · Cloud Support · Junior DevOps· London, UK
Flagship Project
Hanko
Independent anime & manga tracker, live in production on the web and Google Play.
Solo-designed, built, and operated alongside the full-time job. Not a tutorial project: real users, real billing, real incidents, and the infrastructure to catch them.
52k+
titles in a self-owned catalog, no third-party API at request time
11
scheduled pipeline jobs building & healing that catalog
<1 min
from job failure to alert in my Discord ops channel
~50ms
warm recommendation loads, down from 1.7s after a caching rework
Architecture
- Owned data pipeline. Eleven scheduled jobs ingest from legal public sources, dedupe against the live catalog, and publish through idempotent upserts, with review queues for anything ambiguous instead of silent guesses.
- Observability first. Every run posts a summary; failures and cancellations page a Discord ops channel. The alerting caught a live pipeline crash within one minute of its first production run.
- CI/CD discipline. Every change ships through pull requests with typecheck, lint, build, and schema-drift gates on GitHub Actions, then deploys via Vercel previews before production.
- Performance as an SLO. Cookie-free static shell served from the CDN, streamed page sections, parallelised reads: 90 to 100 mobile scores in Vercel Speed Insights across most regions.
- The unglamorous parts too. Stripe billing, cost-capped AI enrichment, row-level security, GDPR/DMCA workflows with an admin kill switch, and a Google Play launch (TWA) currently in closed testing with a tester programme.
Solo project · private repo · happy to walk through the code and architecture in an interview.
Day Job
IT Technician · Oasis Community Learning
since Sept 2022 · London- Primary IT contact for two academies in a seven-school cluster: 1,000+ managed devices across macOS, Windows, and iPad estates.
- Provision and manage devices with Microsoft Intune (led the migration off Jamf); Windows builds and imaging through SCCM; identity and access via Active Directory and M365.
- Cisco Meraki networking across sites; full device-lifecycle ownership from procurement to rebuild.
- Built the cluster-wide IT knowledge base from scratch (IPs, VLANs, device configs, site processes), now maintained by the whole team.
Progression: volunteer (2022) → Level 3 Network & Cloud apprenticeship, Distinction (2023–2025) → hired into the role.
Infrastructure / Homelab
- Proxmox hypervisor with VMs and LXC containers; Unraid NAS
- UniFi networking; Cloudflare Tunnels for secure external access
- Docker services including monitoring and local AI (OpenWebUI + Ollama)
- “Diagnosed a storage bottleneck by identifying containers incorrectly stored on network storage vs local NVMe”
Also Built
HAXFORD - SearxNG
Privacy-focused search interface using Next.js API routes as a smart proxy. Aggregates results from multiple public SearXNG instances for resilience.
Skills
Infrastructure & Ops
Proxmox, Docker, LXC, UniFi, Cloudflare (Tunnels, R2), GitHub Actions CI/CD, Vercel
Microsoft
Intune, Active Directory, SCCM, M365, Azure fundamentals
Data & Backend
PostgreSQL, Drizzle ORM, REST APIs, SPARQL (Wikidata), Supabase
Languages
TypeScript/JavaScript, SQL, Bash, Python (learning), Lua
Tools & Platforms
macOS (daily driver), Linux (two years as main OS), Neovim, Git, Windows
Certifications
Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900)
2026 · Score: 794
Level 3 Network & Cloud Apprenticeship
Distinction · Oasis Community Learning, 2025
City & Guilds: ICT Support Technician
2025
CompTIA Network+
In progress