I build things and give them away

I'm Richard Harvey — call me Ric. My open source work spans more than 60 public repositories, has gathered close to 2,000 stars and 900 forks, and my container images have been pulled from Docker Hub over 50 million times — the bulk of them from a single nginx-php-fpm image I published years ago and still maintain.

I'm a career infrastructure engineer and Developer Advocate with deep AWS roots. I've worked with the APIs since the SOAP days, built large-scale systems on Forgejo, GitLab, Jenkins, Circle CI and Travis, and led geographically distributed teams across the UK, Germany and France. Most recently I built and led the developer relations function behind an 11,000+ member internal engineering community at a major UK bank, delivering demos, workshops and tutorials — and pushing to release as much of it publicly as I could.

Today I run SquareCows Ltd, an AI and automation consultancy specialising in MCP servers, agent skills and self-hosted AI tooling. I write mostly Python and increasingly Rust, and I'm a Terraform convert who can still speak CloudFormation when the job demands it.

I care about open standards, digital sovereignty and the fediverse — which is why everything above the fold on this page runs on hardware in my own house.

What I'm building

Project	What it does
OmniMem	Self-hosted semantic memory server for AI agents, built on MCP. Stops every session starting from zero. My flagship.
nginx-php-fpm	The container that quietly went everywhere — 50M+ pulls and counting.
forgejo-mcp	Drive a Forgejo instance from an AI agent — repos, issues, PRs, releases, admin.
mastodon-mcp	The fediverse as a first-class tool for agents.
legislation-gov-uk-mcp	UK legislation, queryable by an agent. Public data should be easy to reach.
ai-skills	Agent skills I use daily, packaged so you can too.
bovine-pages-server	The Pages server hosting this profile's sibling site. Yes, it's cows all the way down.

Teaching material, if that's what you came for

• terraform-tofu-labs — hands-on labs for Terraform and OpenTofu on AWS
• git-guide — Git from first principles
• mastodon-setup-guide — run your own instance

The book

I wrote The Missing Piece — the culture that drives innovation: achieving DevSecOps through cultural change. It argues that DevSecOps doesn't arrive by executive decree; it grows from the bottom up, in stand-ups and retros and the small everyday moments of trust between people who want to build good things.

That matters more now, not less. AI has made code cheap and abundant. What hasn't sped up is judgement — the instinct to build the right thing rather than a plausible thing, and the gut feeling that something isn't quite right. Those stay stubbornly human, and they only surface in cultures where humans are actually listened to.

Everything in it was learnt the hard way, usually by getting it wrong first.

Away from the keyboard

Dad of two boys. Guitarist and unrepentant live music fan. Incurable tinkerer — 3D-printed builds, KiCad boards, and a run of energy storage and generation projects driven by a stubborn belief that technology should tread lightly on the planet.

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“Anyone can have a great idea. You just need to listen.”

_{The biggest blocker in any industry is culture — so let's fix that one first.}