Tom Wood · Central Florida

I can help build real systems —
grounded in how they actually work.

Part builder, part high-tech administration partner. I use AI to help build systems — and to keep them cheap, secure, and healthy: hunting billing waste, surfacing infrastructure and security issues. My value is knowing what "right" looks like, and catching what's wrong.

How I build

I don't pretend to hand-write every line — I vibe-code with AI, backed by real understanding of the inner workings: the AWS primitives, the architecture trade-offs, the security posture, why one design beats another. My real edge is using AI to correct, verify, and strengthen AI — draft with one pass, critique and adversarially verify with another, then harden it against what I actually know. The human deciding what's right is the value. When a modal renders fine on one design but breaks on another, I know it's a transformed ancestor trapping a fixed element — not just "the AI made a mistake." Judgment is the job. And it's not only code — I point the same AI-augmented approach at operations: auditing cloud billing for waste, surfacing infrastructure and security issues, keeping the stack lean. A partner in high-tech administration, not just a coder.

Selected work

Platform migration · Lead

WordPress → static, own-the-stack

Led the replacement of a 19-brand mortgage WordPress multisite with a Next.js static platform on S3 + CloudFront — per-domain host routing, content-as-JSON edited by trained staff, lead forms on Lambda + DynamoDB. Every resource is Infrastructure-as-Code (CloudFormation), so test and prod deploy from the same templates. The payoff: a stack you fully own that runs for a few dollars a month instead of servers + plugins to patch — cheap, fast, nothing to hack.

Next.jsS3 / CloudFrontLambda / DynamoDBCloudFormation (IaC)own-the-stack
Tooling · Solo

AWS cost + security auditor

A read-only sweeper (IaC, ~$2/mo) that inventories an AWS account, prices idle waste (~$67k/yr reclaimable found), and flags live security exposure — world-open security groups, public databases, IAM gaps — cross-checked against AWS Security Hub.

NodeAWS APIsSecurity Hubleast-privilege IAM
Product · For fun

Self-contained web apps

Small, single-file apps that run entirely on-device — a weekly meal planner, a cocktail app, a movie tracker. Zero backend, add-to-home-screen ready. Proof I can take an idea to a working thing quickly.

Vanilla JSlocalStoragePWA-ish
Ops · Ongoing

Self-hosted infrastructure

This very site runs on an Ubuntu VPS I administer — Caddy for automatic HTTPS, several sites side by side, and SSH locked to a private Tailscale network so it's never exposed to the public internet. I run the stack, not just deploy to someone else's.

UbuntuCaddyTailscalenginx

Toolbox

AWS: S3 · CloudFront · Lambda · DynamoDB · IAM · CloudFormation Static web (Next.js, vanilla) WordPress Security hardening Cloud cost / FinOps Systems administration Own-the-stack architecture AI-augmented development Linux / self-hosting Tailscale / private networking

Contact

Building something, hiring, or just want to talk shop?

⚑ Draft placeholders — confirm before this goes public: email + which links to include.
Email me GitHub LinkedIn