SELECTED WORK
Ideas are easy. Making them real is the interesting part.
I'm Bjarni Kristján Leifsson — I work across Software Engineering, DevOps, Integration and Technical Project Management. Some of these systems I designed and built from the ground up. On others my role was integration and rollout: taking a system into a live environment and adapting it to local technical and operational requirements until it held up in real use. Both are on this page, and each card says which.
- Product Development
- Cloud & Infrastructure
- DevOps & Delivery
- Data & Integrations
- Monitoring & Observability
- Geospatial & Environmental
- Aviation & Safety Systems
- Technical Project Management
- User-Centered Solutions
- Research & Innovation
THE WHOLE SYSTEM — 7 LAYERS
Deciding what gets built, what gets paid for, and what gets said no to.
roadmaps · vendors · budgets · hiring · the difficult conversation
Turning a business problem into something that can actually be shipped.
scope · requirements · trade-offs · the thing behind the request
The services and interfaces that earn the money. Where most people stop.
APIs · services · data models · the code itself
Getting it from a laptop to production repeatedly, safely and boringly.
CI/CD · environments · releases · rollbacks · GitLab
The ground everything stands on, defined in code so it can be rebuilt.
infrastructure as code · cloud · containers · Docker · networking
Knowing it broke before the customer does, and knowing why afterwards.
metrics · logs · traces · alerting · on-call · postmortems
What it all ultimately runs on. Ignored until it is the only thing that matters.
routing · DNS · certificates · capacity · physics
Most engineers live on one or two of these. Most outages come from the ones they don’t.
Good technology solves problems. Great technology empowers people.
$ git log --graph --all --since=2015
BREAK IT
Click anything. Watch what the rest of it does.
A production system, running. Every dot is a request being routed to a healthy instance — kill one and the survivors carry it, kill the last one and you find out what actually depended on it. This is the job, and it is more instructive than a bullet point saying “high availability”.
- REQ/S
- 0
- ERRORS
- 0%
- p99
- 0ms
- AVAILABILITY
- 100%
- No incidents. Click something to change that.
- ACTYBUILT FROM SCRATCHLIVE · IN DEVELOPMENT
ActyPeople in Motion
My partDesign & buildA platform for discovering activities, events and communities across Iceland. Get out, move, belong.
Activity data→Discovery→Filter / map→Detail→Join · book · goProductMapsCommunityacty.isConcept visualization - ELRUNEBUILT FROM SCRATCHLIVE · IN DEVELOPMENT
ElrunePercentile roleplaying, done right
My partDesign & buildBasic Roleplaying in the browser: build percentile characters in minutes, roll dice nobody can fake, and fight on a living 3D table with your group on phone, tablet or PC.
Build a hero→Invite the table→3D battle map→Server-side roll→Hash-chained log3DReal-timeGame rulesSHA-256Phone · tablet · PCelrune.ioConcept visualization - SOLANA MARKETPLACEBUILT FROM SCRATCHIN DEVELOPMENT
Solana MarketplaceA freelance marketplace where the payment rules live on-chain
My partDesign & buildAn experimental freelance marketplace combining jobs, proposals, contracts and protected delivery with Solana-based USDC / SOL escrow. Focused on deterministic settlement, state-machine design and financial security invariants.
Job created→Proposal→Contract→Client funds escrow→Escrow vault→Work delivered→Accept · refund · dispute→Deterministic settlementSolanaRustAnchorUSDCSOLEscrowTypeScriptPostgreSQLWallet AuthSecurityConcept visualization - BUILT FROM SCRATCHLIVE
Platform, Infrastructure & OperationsDTE
My partDesign & buildOwnership & operationsOwned DevOps, infrastructure and IT operations at DTE — improving platform reliability, CI/CD, development workflows and deployment processes, alongside vendor, purchasing and billing responsibility.
Local→GitLab→CI→Docker→Deploy→Production- Platform reliability and stability
- Robust CI/CD pipelines
- Improved deployment processes
- Vendor, purchasing and billing oversight
DockerGitLab CIPuppetVMwareLinuxMonitoringConcept visualization - TREMVINTEGRATED & ROLLED OUTLIVE
TREMVReal-time seismic monitoring
My partSupervision & technical leadershipIntegration & rolloutOpen-source seismic monitoring software created to modernize real-time tremor monitoring at the Icelandic Meteorological Office — processing and visualizing RSAM data with frequency-band analysis.
Seismic stations→Waveform stream→RSAM real-time processing→Frequency-band filtering→Monitoring room display→Classification & alertingPythonReal-time systemsSignal processingScientific softwareMonitoringConcept visualization - INTEGRATED & ROLLED OUTLIVE
Icelandic Water ViewerNational environmental data & GIS platform
My partIntegration & rolloutA public environmental information system making complex water-management data accessible through maps, structured information and downloadable datasets. My part was integration and rollout — getting it working against Icelandic data sources and into operational use.
Data source→Ingestion→Normalization→Map / visualization→User decisionGISEnvironmental dataData visualizationInformation architecturePublic sectorConcept visualization - TOSBUILT FROM SCRATCHLIVE
TOSTækja- og stöðvagrunnur
My partDesign & buildA centralized information system consolidating operation and maintenance information for measurement equipment and weather stations across Iceland. Originally built as Trausti, later renamed TOS — Tækja- og stöðvagrunnur.
Local databases→Consolidation→Unified schema→Operational system→Authorized staffDatabase designInformation architectureEnterprise softwareAsset managementskemman.is — the original thesisConcept visualization - INTEGRATED & ROLLED OUTSTATUS UNKNOWN
Flight Incident ReportingSafer skies through faster reporting
My partSupervision & technical leadershipIntegration & rolloutA mobile app for reporting in-flight incidents to the Icelandic Meteorological Office. Turbulence, icing and mountain waves — but also altitude loss and speed changes from variable gusts.
Pilot report→Validation→Location & condition data→Met Office→Operational awarenessMobile systemsDomain modelingSafety-critical UXRequirementsPublic sectorConcept visualization - BUILT FROM SCRATCHARCHIVE
VeraSecurity architecture · backend engineering
My partDesign & buildBackend architecture for a home-monitoring system that turned unused smartphones into affordable security cameras — cutting against the cost of commercial home security.
Old smartphone→Camera node→Socket.IO stream→Backend + PostgreSQL→PagerDuty alertNode.jsExpressPostgreSQLJWTOpenSSLSocket.IONginxPM2PagerDutyUbuntudevpost.com/software/veraConcept visualization
Research & experiments
The work behind the work.
Smaller pieces, but they explain where the systems thinking comes from.
- MSc research
Planning Support System for UX Evaluation
Reykjavík University
How structured UX-evaluation information can support planning and decision-making during software development. A framework and tool built around the factors that most affect evaluation planning, reducing the time and cost of an evaluation and helping manage product complexity.
- Machine learning
Predicting Working Memory from Cardiovascular Data
Reykjavík University
Machine-learning analysis of cardiovascular measurements from 98 participants performing increasingly stressful cognitive tests. A TreeBagger model reached 74% accuracy classifying which Stroop-test condition a participant was performing; the analysis also explored the relationship between time pressure, heart rate and blood pressure.
- Data modeling
M3 — Multidimensional Media Model
Reykjavík University
Applying multidimensional-analysis concepts to media data, including a prototype media server implementing the model for interactive exploration of multimedia collections. The M3 research line is still in use in Reykjavík University research today.
Ideas & initiative
Work nobody asked for.
Concepts pursued outside any job or client, because the problem was worth solving.
Independent product proposal
Apple Medical ID
A product concept for Apple's Medical ID: getting blood type and emergency contact details off a locked phone and in front of a paramedic in seconds, for the case where the person it belongs to is unconscious or badly injured and cannot tell anyone anything.
The problem is easy to state and it happens every day: someone is unconscious after an accident, the information that would help the people treating them — blood type, allergies, who to call — is on the phone in their pocket, and the phone is locked. Every second spent working around that is a second not spent on the patient. I researched who inside Apple owned that surface and wrote it up as a structured product document rather than a suggestion: the user story, the flow from lock screen to critical details, the interface and how it could be built. Then I sent it to the people who could act on it, and asked for nothing in return. Apple later shipped this functionality.
This was my proposal to Apple. Whether it played any part in what they shipped, I have no idea.
What it demonstrates