About - The Techtonic

I'm Cole Rhys, a network engineer based in Sydney with over a decade of experience managing large-scale tech infrastructure. And that decade teaches you one thing above all. Complex systems only make sense once you stop staring at the surface and start tracing how the pieces actually connect underneath. That's the lens I bring to everything I write here.

Outside of work, I'm building and testing my own AI-powered projects, just to see what actually works and what falls apart the moment it meets reality. The Techtonic is where I write down what I find along the way.

I've been pulled toward economics and finance since I was a student, not because any of it ever came easily, but because it didn't. Every time I tried to understand something useful, I'd hit a wall of jargon that seemed designed to keep people out rather than let them in. At some point I stopped accepting that as normal. Information doesn't have to be locked behind language only insiders understand. That frustration is basically the reason this blog exists.

I won't pretend to have it all figured out. What I do have is a technical background and a habit of testing ideas myself before I write about them, building things outside of my day job, hitting dead ends, occasionally getting something to work, and learning in the trenches rather than from a distance. If I can sit with something confusing long enough to actually understand it, I can usually explain it in a way that lands for someone else too.

Every piece here comes out of that process, my own process of figuring things out in real time. I can't promise I'll always be right. But I can promise I'm doing the work before I ask you to read about it. With any luck, that ends up being useful to you as well.

You can also find me on Threads @tech.tonic99 where I share shorter takes on the same topics.