Hi, I'm Ishan. I'm a systems and network architect and Chief Technology Officer at Rehab Media Group. I've spent more than two decades designing, building, and running production software, Linux systems, and DevOps infrastructure, and lately working AI into the stack. What I write here comes from the full arc of that work, not any single job.
Before any of that I served in the US Army as a Fire Direction Specialist, including a deployment for Operation Iraqi Freedom. Running an office accountable for ninety personnel at twenty-two teaches you things about systems and failure that no amount of production experience quite replicates.
My foundations were laid early, learning system design, relational databases, and programming as a kid before most people meet those ideas. But the thing that really shaped how I build was security. I came up reverse engineering and debugging at the instruction level, fascinated by how systems break, and that lens never left. Every system I've designed since has treated security as a first-order concern, not something bolted on at the end.
These days I split my attention between three things: architecting and running production systems, building DNS Checker, a domain intelligence platform I designed and wrote myself that analyzes 240M+ domains a day, and writing.
TechEarl is the writing side. It's where I work out what I learn as I go, partly to leave a useful trail for other developers, partly as a reference for the next time I trip over the same problem myself. The aim is to write down the things I actually had to figure out under a real deadline, not rehash what's already everywhere.
If you want the shorter version, the career rather than the articles, ishankarunaratne.com is my personal site. It has the full track from the US Army through to CTO, the credentials, and everything else I have built and still run, including DNS Checker, Lipwalk, and the rest.