terong.com
Systems built over decades. A community-built taxonomy underwater. A life spent looking closely. Scroll down.
01 — Engineering
I've spent my career moving large organizations onto cloud infrastructure — mapping what exists, planning how to migrate it without breaking anything, and staying in the room from the first proposal through to the last handover. Identity and access, service architecture, observability, the unglamorous plumbing that has to hold under real load. I've sat across from executives explaining why a migration will take the time it takes, and across from engineers arguing about the right way to cut a monolith apart. Both conversations matter.
What I'm good at isn't any single technology. It's holding the whole shape of a complex transition in my head at once — the architecture, the timeline, the people who have to live with the decision after I'm gone.
02 — Taxonomy
Years ago I built a website to solve a small, specific problem: divers kept photographing nudibranchs — small, dazzlingly patterned sea slugs — with no way to know what they were looking at. Latin names, cryptic coloration, thousands of species with no common names to search by. I wrote the identification system myself and let people submit photos against it. It grew past anything I expected: tens of thousands of images, over a thousand contributing photographers, and eventually a reference source that working taxonomists cited in their own field guides.
I ran it alone for years until it outgrew what one person could maintain, and it eventually went quiet. It's since been rebuilt from the ground up as a community-verified platform — contributors and experts vote on identifications together instead of one inbox doing all the work. The published records now feed into the open marine-biodiversity databases researchers and conservationists actually query. A hobby photo, correctly named, becomes a citable data point.
It's the same instinct as the engineering work: build the system that lets a community classify something precisely, then get out of its way.
03 — Underwater
I've logged more dives than I can count, mostly with a camera in hand. Underwater photography demands a strange kind of patience — you can't rush a subject, you can't control the light, and you get maybe three seconds before the moment is gone. It has taught me more about attention than almost anything else I do.
There's a version of this practice that shows up nowhere else on this page: the quiet, the weightlessness, the discipline of staying still long enough to actually see something.
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