I’m Mitch Reynolds — a field technician, network engineer and backend developer based in Victoria, Australia, with a bit over a decade of getting my hands dirty across education, managed services and enterprise environments.
By day I’m Technical Services Manager and a Level 4 Support Engineer at TechAssist, and a roaming specialist technician for the Department of Education. Outside of that I’m the director of AussieWave Hosting and one of the Militant Goose Developers, building secure internal tools and APIs for a handful of organisations that trust us with the plumbing.
What I actually do
Most of my work lives where software meets infrastructure: backend development in PHP (mostly CodeIgniter 4), MySQL and MariaDB, sitting on top of Linux, Docker and CI/CD pipelines I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time hardening. Networks, firewalls and system hardening are the through-line — I care more about boringly secure and maintainable than clever. Security isn’t a feature I bolt on at the end; it’s the shape of the thing from the start.
On the paper side, that’s backed by a Bachelor of Computer Science from Swinburne with dual majors in Cybersecurity and Software Engineering, plus a dual diploma in IT networking and systems administration.
Why this blog exists
This is where I write it all down before I forget it: networking fundamentals, development notes, and the infrastructure and CI/CD-hardening pieces that land in The Tech Toolbox. Some of it is reference material for future-me on a job; some of it is just working out loud. If it saves you an afternoon of head-scratching, even better.
Away from the keyboard
When I’m not staring at a terminal you’ll usually find me on the archery range — there’s more overlap between a consistent anchor point and clean fault isolation than you’d think — or volunteering as a first responder with St John Ambulance Victoria. Right now I’m poking at n8n automation and running the occasional networking-fundamentals workshop.
If any of that overlaps with what you’re building, say hello.