About the Author

Timothy O’Brien started programming at eight on a TRS-80 and has written software professionally since 1996. He began on Wall Street in the first years of the commercial web, at TheStreet.com through its 1999 IPO and at Forbes.com, working as a bridge between the journalists and traders who understood markets and the technology that drove them. His first book was Jakarta Commons Cookbook (O’Reilly, 2004), and he went on to write or co-write other O’Reilly books on open-source Java.

From build configuration, his work moved through deployments to capacity management and cloud cost, and much of it has meant connecting engineering teams with database specialists. He has managed more than a billion dollars in cloud and data-center spend. He led a large organization’s cloud capacity through the COVID-19 surge, then drove the analysis and decisions behind savings measures worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He frequently discusses strategies for managing cloud capacity and spend with vendors and with companies in the FinOps community, has given keynotes at FinOps X, and writes essays on cloud cost and the economics of AI-assisted software, several of them republished by O’Reilly Radar.

He is also the author of Redundant, a novel about FinOps and organizational power that opens The Condition Set trilogy, and of The AI Developer’s Field Guide (Slop Codex), a catalog of the anti-patterns AI brings to software engineering. His nonfiction combines technical investigation, personal mistakes, and a continuing suspicion that the sentence “It’s simple” is about to become expensive.