Lawrence Aiello's Blog

My Homelab Setup: Hardware

lawrence.aiello@laiello.com (Lawrence Aiello) — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 12:58:49 -0400

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on building out my homelab setup. It’s something I have been working on for a while, but accelerated it due to having more time and wanting to build an online photo album for my son. In this post, I will go over my desk setup and the hardware I am using to manage the lab. I also use this space for working from home, and it’s been quite comfortable for me.

The Post Labor Dev Era

lawrence.aiello@laiello.com (Lawrence Aiello) — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 16:25:16 -0400

The Post-Labor Dev Era

AI was a hype machine in 2025, and I don’t expect that to stop. If you open LinkedIn, you’ll see it everywhere (and yes, I’m contributing to it too).

What’s more interesting to me is that most people still don’t feel the hype in their daily work. That’s not because the tools aren’t real. It’s because adoption is slow for two reasons:

Human inertia: changing habits is hard.
Bureaucratic inertia: companies move slowly, even when the tools exist.

And bureaucracies are made of people, so those forces compound.

Book Review: Designing Machine Learning Systems

lawrence.aiello@laiello.com (Lawrence Aiello) — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 09:49:37 -0400

Since the start of this year, my place of work has started to delve deeper into the work of AI model infrastructure. Much of the work around AI leaves me asking “why” on many things. In addition to this, many new terms are getting thrown around at work and I find myself lost. As much as I want others at the office to teach me everything, we are all busy. I am one of those people who still like to read books to learn (which is a bit ironic given I could just ask ChatGPT I guess) and thus I found myself reading this book.

Book Review: Rust in a Month of Lunches

lawrence.aiello@laiello.com (Lawrence Aiello) — Sat, 12 Oct 2024 13:46:38 -0400

I have attempted to learn Rust many times over the past few years. There are two main reasons why I have not picked up the Rust language until recently:

The learning curve seems steep for a language that I may not end up using on a day-to-day basis.
Most of the learning material is too theoretical and not practical enough for me to understand how these concepts are applied in real-world projects.

The first point is no longer a concern as I now work at a company that uses Rust in production. The second point is what motivated me to finally pick up the book Learn Rust in a Month of Lunches. It promised to be an approachable guide to Rust that is practical and immediately applicable to real-world projects. Seduced by these promises, along with the confidence of Amazon’s 30-day money back guarantee, I decided to give it a shot.

Digital Nomad: Colombia

lawrence.aiello@laiello.com (Lawrence Aiello) — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 07:56:50 -0500

Digital Nomad in Colombia

I’ve never met a person that really enjoys the Northeastern winters, we just deal with it. The past few winters, I have been traveling to warmer climates during a portion of it to get a break from the cold weather. I imagine at some point in my future, I will eventually be spending most of winter in another place. So this issue of “Digital Nomad” will be concerning my brief time spent in Latin America, specifically Colombia. I will briefly go over the two cities I visited and worked from, and at the end give some pros/cons if you are considering a trip like this.

Digital Nomad: China

lawrence.aiello@laiello.com (Lawrence Aiello) — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 16:25:16 -0400

Digital Nomad in China

Recently, I had the opportunity to travel in China. It was a month long trip and was a mixture of pleasure (sightseeing) and personal (my partner’s family is from there). Given that I recently joined my company and due to the length of the trip, I did not have the luxury of taking too much time off. I love a challenge, so I decided to work west coast US hours from Asia. Yes, you read that right. For a month straight, I worked from 12am - 8am every weekday. In this article, I want to share a little of what I saw there, and also offer some tips if you want to do the same.

Arch Adventures: Installing AWS SSM

lawrence.aiello@laiello.com (Lawrence Aiello) — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 16:25:16 -0400

Arch Adventures: Installing AWS SSM

One of my DevOps side projects as of late has been setting up blockchain nodes. Since proof of stake has really taken hold a few years back, we are seeing a Cambrian explosion of projects all using proof of stake to secure their network. It is the perfect environment for DevOps engineers to practice their craft as there is and will need to be a huge DevOps need to power these networks as they continue to grow.

About Me

lawrence.aiello@laiello.com (Lawrence Aiello) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hey there! My name is Lawrence Aiello and I am a seasoned technology professional with over 10 years of experience. I have held roles as a Software Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer, Consultant, and now as a DevOps Engineer. Across each role, the common thread has been the same: building systems that reduce deployment friction, improve operational consistency, and help engineering teams scale with confidence.

The theme throughout my career is adaptability. I’ve moved across different engineering disciplines by continually learning what teams need to ship faster, reduce operational burden, and support growing infrastructure demands. In the current age of AI, that adaptability has become even more important as I explore how AI can improve engineering workflows, platform capabilities, and developer velocity. I’m always interested in connecting with engineering leaders, platform teams, and builders working on cloud strategy, GitOps, infrastructure automation, developer experience, or AI enablement.