+ Light through curved glass. Everyone moving, no one in a hurry.
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+ Ausb.
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+ I build things that are hard to get right and matter when you do. Right now I'm building Partida — immigration case management for families moving to Portugal — while leading platform engineering work focused on CI/CD, deployment systems, security scanning, observability, and internal automation.
+Now Playing
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+My Photo Journal
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+ Ausb.
function setPlaying(playing) { bars.forEach(b => b.classList.toggle('paused', !playing)); + document.getElementById('musicSquiggle').classList.toggle('playing', playing); playPause.textContent = playing ? '⏸' : '▶'; } diff --git a/photo.html b/photo.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9698db5 --- /dev/null +++ b/photo.html @@ -0,0 +1,418 @@ + + + + + +
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+ Photos.
+Moments from the road — cities, shows, strangers, and quiet in-betweens.
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+ 
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+ Birds over the U-Bahn.
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+ 
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+ Looking out a window in Porto. Shot on film.
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+ 
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+ On a cell phone at sunset.
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+ 
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+ Susto sound check.
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+ 
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+ Shredding.
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+ Somewhere near the old town.
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+ 
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+ Night fishing is a thing.
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- Enjoy my photography (っˆڡˆς)
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diff --git a/terraform.html b/terraform.html
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+Sometimes the Best Infrastructure Decision Is Removing Infrastructure
+
+There’s a certain phase every engineering team goes through where everything starts becoming “enterprise grade.”
+
+Terraform modules get layered on top of Terraform modules. CI pipelines call other pipelines that trigger workflows that eventually update YAML that updates another system that finally deploys the thing you originally wanted to change three hours ago.
+
+At some point, your infrastructure starts feeling less like engineering and more like participating in an ancient ceremonial process where nobody wants to touch the sacred state file.
+
+I say this with love because I genuinely like Terraform. It solves real problems. But I also think small and mid-sized teams sometimes inherit infrastructure patterns designed for organizations with entire platform departments dedicated to maintaining them.
+
+And sometimes the most senior engineering decision you can make is admitting:
+
+“We are overengineering this.”
+
+That realization hit our team slowly.
+
+We had Kubernetes workloads running on GKE, Terraform Enterprise managing pieces of infrastructure, secrets moving through multiple systems, and operational workflows that looked great in architecture diagrams but were exhausting in practice.
+
+Simple tasks somehow became:
+
+Open Terraform
+Update module
+Run plan
+Hope state is healthy
+Wait for approvals
+Re-run because drift happened
+Inject secrets somewhere else
+Finally deploy application
+
+Meanwhile, developers just wanted to ship software without feeling like they were diffusing a bomb.
+
+The deeper issue wasn’t Terraform itself. The issue was that our operational complexity had outgrown the actual needs and staffing of the team. We didn’t have a dedicated army of infrastructure specialists managing module lifecycle strategy and provider drift full time. We had engineers trying to support services, ship features, maintain uptime, and survive meetings.
+
+So we stepped back and asked a much simpler question:
+
+What are we actually trying to optimize for?
+
+The answer wasn’t “maximum infrastructure flexibility.”
+
+It was:
+
+reliable deployments
+simpler operations
+easier onboarding
+faster delivery
+fewer moving parts
+less fear around making changes
+
+That changed everything.
+
+We moved toward a managed Kubernetes platform and simplified our ownership boundaries significantly. Instead of continuously managing infrastructure orchestration layers, we focused on application delivery and operational consistency.
+
+At the same time, we moved secrets management into a native secret management platform rather than threading sensitive configuration through multiple CI/CD layers like a very stressful game of telephone.
+
+The result was honestly kind of refreshing.
+
+Our CI/CD pipelines became dramatically simpler:
+
+build
+test
+scan
+deploy
+
+That was it.
+
+No giant infrastructure orchestration dance every time someone needed to update something small.
+
+We also standardized deployments through reusable repository templates and parameterized Kubernetes manifests so engineers didn’t need to become accidental platform experts just to launch a service.
+
+And interestingly, removing complexity improved reliability more than adding additional “safety” layers ever did.
+
+That’s the part I think engineering culture sometimes misses:
+complexity itself is a production risk.
+
+Every abstraction layer has an operational cost. Every clever system creates future debugging sessions. Every additional tool requires ownership, context, maintenance, and emotional energy from the people running it.
+
+Small teams especially need to protect themselves from infrastructure ambition creep.
+
+Because eventually you wake up and realize:
+you didn’t build a platform for developers —
+you built a full-time job maintaining the platform itself.
+
+I still believe deeply in infrastructure-as-code, automation, and platform engineering. But I also believe maturity as an engineer is learning when not to build the more complicated thing.
+
+Sometimes the best architecture decision is the one that lets your team breathe again.
+
+
+
+=======
+
+
+There’s a very specific kind of fear that enters a small engineering team when someone says:
+
+“Don’t worry, Terraform manages it.”
+
+At first, it feels comforting. Infrastructure as code. Reusable modules. Enterprise-grade workflows. Clean architecture diagrams. Everything versioned. Everything declarative. Everything “scalable.”
+
+Then six months later, someone needs to rotate a secret and suddenly three engineers are staring at a failed Terraform plan like archaeologists trying to decode an ancient warning tablet.
+
+I don’t say that to knock Terraform. Terraform is powerful. In the right environment, with the right staffing and operational maturity, it solves real problems elegantly.
+
+But small teams have a dangerous habit of inheriting infrastructure patterns designed for organizations with:
+
+platform divisions
+dedicated infra specialists
+module governance
+architecture committees
+and at least one engineer whose entire personality is Terraform state management
+
+We did not have that team.
+
+What we had was a fast-moving engineering group trying to support internal services, deployments, automation, Kubernetes workloads, CI/CD, and operational reliability all at once.
+
+And over time I realized something uncomfortable:
+
+We were spending more time managing the infrastructure abstraction layer than the infrastructure itself.
+
+Simple things became emotionally expensive.
+
+Updating cluster-related configuration became:
+
+Open Terraform repo
+Update variables
+Wait for plan
+Hope state is healthy
+Debug permissions
+Re-run pipeline
+Reconcile environment drift
+Finally deploy the actual change you wanted in the first place
+
+At some point I had to ask:
+Why are we treating every operational change like we’re provisioning AWS for a Fortune 50 company?
+
+The deeper issue wasn’t tooling. It was complexity ownership.
+
+Infrastructure had become “correct” in theory but painful in practice. The system optimized for flexibility and abstraction instead of operability. We built something architecturally impressive that quietly exhausted the people maintaining it.
+
+So we changed direction.
+
+We moved our workloads onto a managed Kubernetes platform and simplified the ownership model dramatically. Instead of treating every piece of infrastructure as something we needed to orchestrate through Terraform, we focused on standardizing application delivery and reducing operational surface area.
+
+CI/CD became the center of the workflow:
+
+build
+test
+scan
+deploy
+repeat
+
+We also centralized secrets into a native secrets management solution instead of threading sensitive configuration through multiple Terraform layers and deployment abstractions. That one change alone removed a shocking amount of operational friction.
+
+Suddenly:
+
+developers could reason about deployments again
+onboarding became simpler
+secrets management became cleaner
+pipelines became easier to troubleshoot
+and fewer people were afraid to touch production systems
+
+One of my favorite engineering lessons from this experience is that overengineering rarely feels like overengineering while you’re building it. It usually feels responsible. Mature. Future-proof.
+
+Until your team becomes the unpaid emotional support group for your architecture.
+
+That experience changed how I think about platform engineering entirely.
+
+Now I care much more about:
+
+operational clarity
+cognitive load
+onboarding friction
+maintainability
+and whether a team can sustainably operate the thing they built six months from now
+
+Sometimes the best infrastructure decision is not adding another abstraction layer.
+
+Sometimes it’s removing three of them.
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diff --git a/writing/navigation-discoverability.html b/writing/navigation-discoverability.html
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- foto jrnl. -
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- September 2025:Birds flying around in Vienna.
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- August 2025: On a cell phone at sunset in GA.
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- August 2025:Susto sound check.
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- August 2025: Young woman in a museum looking out a window in Porto, PT. on film 🌊
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- December 2024: Young man in Prague, CZ 🌊
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- July 2024: Shredding in Nashville, TN
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- ◀ Back to Home
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- June 2024: Night fishing is a thing..?
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