Hi, I’m Kelly Crabbé.
I’m a DevOps and automation engineer, and most days that means taking the fiddly, repetitive, error-prone parts of running software off people’s plates. I spent the better part of fifteen years as a system administrator before sliding over into DevOps — which, honestly, never felt like a hard switch. I’m still a sysadmin at heart; I just see everything a little differently now. A server, a deployment, a task I’d otherwise do by hand every morning — if it’s predictable and known, it can be written in code and automated. Finding those flows and quietly handing them to a machine is genuinely my favourite thing to do. These days that looks like CI/CD pipelines, cloud on GCP, and low-code automation with n8n. You can read more about the tech side of me if that’s your thing.
There’s another side, too. I’m autistic and ADHD — AuDHD — and queer, and for a long time I kept those parts of myself folded away at work. I was diagnosed around forty (autism in early 2023, ADHD later the same year), and putting names to things I’d spent a lifetime working around changed everything. So now I write and speak about neurodivergence and being your whole self in tech, because the version of me who needed to hear “you’re not broken, you’re just wired differently” didn’t have anyone saying it. A lot of that ends up on the blog.
My personal life hasn’t stood still either.
On 13 August 2021, I married the love of my life and the mother of my plus-daughter: Ziggy, named after Ziggy Stardust, for those wondering. We got married in the garden of her mother and stepfather — a wonderfully intimate ceremony stitched together around the covid rules of the time.
The other great love of the household is Lou, our English Cocker Spaniel, who we adopted in October 2020. He arrived with a few peculiarities — something like ADHD for dogs. As a pup he’d sleep only five or six hours a day when puppies need closer to twenty, so he was perpetually overstimulated, overexcited, and very orally fixated (he chewed actual grooves into the metal of my desk chair). We worked hard and patiently with him, and these days he sleeps like a baby.
As a family, we’ve learned to read our dog and arrange our days around his needs — paying attention to his window of tolerance and his stress bucket. Now and then we misfire, but mostly we manage just fine, and we have a wonderful fur baby who colours every single day.
If you’d like to talk tech, neurodivergence, or both — or just compare notes over a coffee — I’d love to hear from you.