October 25, 2026
I’m a senior engineer with a decade of experience working in companies large and small. I consider myself a generalist, but if you ask me what I enjoy most, then it’s two things: unblocking others and shining a light on what is oft-forgotten.
Everyone is always hired to fill a specific role, but getting to fulfill that role to the best of one’s abilities is hardly straightforward when need be. How I see myself as an engineer is taking away the pain of others who are straddling the line between kind of understanding how a given infrastructure works and being completely oblivious. The pain goes away by concretely solving the problem at hand, providing more context to an answer than required, documenting what was done, and sticking to deadlines so that they too can do their best work and meet any responsibilities they themselves may have had.
When contrasting people with companies, then companies more often than not have areas that have fallen by the wayside: alerting, cost and cloud account management, infrastructure as code, CI/CD performance (and optimizations in general), best practices within teams, etc. It’s completely understandable that this happens as there’s only so many hours in a day, but over time it starts to impact the organization in a very real way as employee churn and costs increase, execution slows, and morale takes a dip. I’ve been around the block enough times by now to have developed a sense of taste for each of those, and what passes muster and what doesn’t. Now, getting each of those down pat takes time and effort, but there are few things more satisfying than seeing each slowly start falling back into place and seeing a team’s confidence improve; another unblock at whole other level.
I’m not opposed to the world of AI and LLMs that has been thrust upon us, but I take care to write every single word myself (sometimes a single word multiple times over, if necessary). I do this because I love the written word and because I respect time, or lack thereof. We’re all here on this earth only but a moment, so if someone has taken the time to read what I’ve written, then the onus is on me to make it worth their while and not feed them something that didn’t have any effort put into it. The tools nowadays are incredible, and in so many ways irreplaceable, but just because a hammer exists doesn’t mean everything is a nail.
The following is a loose list of what I consider myself to be strong and dependable in:
Write to me at usrme [at] protonmail.ch and let’s make something happen!