Honestly, I don’t expect this to last.
I’ve never kept a blog going. Every few months, some rogue neuron nudges me and whispers, “You should write things,” which of course I ignore until it comes tapping again, louder this time. So here we are, mid-tap, trying again. Spoiler: this will either fizzle out spectacularly or spiral into a 200-post saga on Kubernetes drift and obscure musical counterpoint. No middle ground.
I’ve been paying for this domain for years, primarily abusing it as a glorified DNS relay while silently judging myself. This site is my latest attempt at “actual use” though history suggests I’m really just feeding my compulsion to over-engineer workflows.
Let’s call it an experiment: in writing, in consistency, and in whether I can post something without spending three hours debating the punctuation. No promises. Just curiosity, caffeine, and a slowly growing folder of regrets.
Self-Diagnosed Polymath, Occasionally Verified
You’ve seen the homepage, rolled your eyes, muttered “pretentious twat,” and yet curiosity dragged you further. Fair. But hi.
I live in a glass-walled flat on the beach, the kind of place that makes it look like I have my life together if you don't zoom in too hard. There's a telescope naturally gathering dust and distant light pollution. My dog, Kahlúa, swims better than I do. She’s a chocolate Labrador with the kind of personality that could negotiate treaties or start minor uprisings depending on her mood. She drags me to the chiringuito instead of the beach, where she knows the owner keeps ham behind the bar. It's her idea of diplomacy. When mulberries are in season, she spends hours beneath the trees gorging herself, and somehow still finds time to carry the bread home and pizza boxes to the recycling bins like she's gunning for Employee of the Month.
The cats, meanwhile, tag along on walks like tiny, judgmental familiars who've seen too much, quietly assessing my plans for the day so they can later redirect me back to the treat cupboard with all the understated authority of seasoned choreographers.
When the sun's out, I sit with a camera in one hand and a coffee in the other, pretending I’m capturing something profound while actually just photographing the same wave thirty different ways. Occasionally I’ll drift over to the piano and play for a while, until some teenager wandering down the promenade outside decides to loudly ask if I’m streaming on Twitch. I’m not, and I don't even own a Twitch handle, but at this point I’m too far into the performance to correct them or even care.
It’s a strange mix of solitude and spectacle, mostly quiet, usually warm, interrupted only by the cats reminding me I’m late for dinner. Theirs, not mine.
Professionally Distracted Since 2001
I started in web development, back when PHP still ran the internet and nobody had yet invented frameworks to protect us from ourselves. From there, I moved into telecoms, where I helped design and build fibre broadband products, ran the build and provisioning processes, and acted as the technical specialist for the kind of PHP middleware that held entire departments together with duct tape and two-second cron jobs. Eventually, I drifted into broader software engineering, which mostly involved learning what not to do by maintaining things built in a rush, for a deadline, by someone else, usually in a panic.
These days, I haunt the cloud as a solution architect at a managed Kubernetes outfit, specialising in developer experience, AKA making DevOps hurt less and developers swear slightly less often.
Somewhere along the way, my partner (an actual biomedical scientist) needed help wrestling single-cell datasets. One thing led to another and suddenly I’m a co-author on a Nature Communications paper, “IκBα controls dormancy in hematopoietic stem cells via retinoic acid during embryonic development,” June 2024. Apparently you can get your name in print in a Nature paper just by running Bash and R scripts at 2 a.m.
Before that, there was a publication in Stem Cell Reports, "HDAC1 and HDAC2 Modulate TGF-β Signaling during Endothelial-to-Hematopoietic Transition." A solid medium-impact paper that maybe five people actually read, and two of those were probably just skimming for figure formatting ideas.
After sunset I switch from YAML to staves and compose what I half-jokingly call tone poems for the twenty-first century, modern film-score-adjacent soundscapes with just enough orchestration to trick you into thinking I planned it that way. It’s a swirl of resonant mallets, strings and French horn, just enough sonic colour to imply an orchestra without actually hiring one. Think less ambient wallpaper, more the soundtrack to a fantasy epic that got shelved halfway through production because the composer insisted on scoring an entire forest scene using nothing but bells and unresolved discordant harmony.
If you’re curious, my 2023 EP Awakening (four tracks, 24 minutes) lurks on Apple and Amazon Music. It’s basically what would happen if Sibelius and Bartók co-scored a brooding fantasy epic and left the conductor guessing whether the forest was enchanted or about to eat the protagonist.
Before all of this, back when I had more hair and fewer Kubernetes clusters, I maintained a now-deceased blog that offered a blend of Bash complaints, experimental nonsense, and the kind of poetic detritus you'd expect from someone who once tried to rewrite Red Riding Hood as a blood opera.
Some of it was introspective, some of it was ridiculous, and some of it involved rewriting fairy tales with battle axes and gore. If you saw the recent story about Red Riding Hood with a vendetta and a very sharp axe, you’ve read my work. I wrote that as a poem, once, on a whim. And yes, it’s probably not the worst thing I’ve put online.
It turns out the line between writing for infrastructure and writing for catharsis is thinner than most people think.
Routines, Rituals, and the Occasional Existential Crisis
Somewhere between the hours of dog-walking and debugging lies the rhythm of my day. I’m one of those people who wakes up at 5 a.m., not because I’m virtuous or chasing sunrise wellness, but because I genuinely enjoy the silence. The mornings are methodical: coffee, book, walk. And then it’s straight into the digital mire, Slack threads, GitHub alerts, weird container failures that only happen on Thursdays.
By 10:30, I’m in stand-up. It's not just a recurring meeting; it's the heartbeat of the day. My team comes first, customers a close second, and the rest of the world can queue politely. Officially, I work Tuesday to Friday, 09:00 to 18:00 CET. Unofficially, I just keep going until something breaks. Ideally not me.
I thrive in flow states: ambient loops in the background, the dog asleep beside the desk, and the kind of isolation that turns “do not disturb” into a lifestyle. I'm the guy who used to have a sign that read "Do not disturb before the end of the opera" on his desk. That kind of half-serious passive aggressiveness that isn't quite enough to get a HR complaint, but is only two steps behind.
Communication is fine, so long as it has a point. If you ping me with a “hey” and nothing else, you’ll get the same energy back, possibly delayed by several hours and a mild grudge.
What I do well is this: troubleshooting, pattern spotting, reducing entropy. I don’t cling to legacy code out of nostalgia. If it’s broken and pointless, I’ll bin it. If someone’s blocked, I’ll drop in. If the tooling’s wrong, I’ll fix it or obsess over it until it breaks in more interesting ways.
Feedback? Just say it. I prefer things direct, constructive, and ideally meme-adjacent. I come to work to solve hard things with good people, and occasionally to delete 300 lines of YAML and call it spiritual renewal.
Cats, Cameras, and Unfinished Scripts
Somewhere in a forgotten folder is a script I wrote to organise my entire photo archive by EXIF data and location tags. It’s beautiful, well thought through, and of course, completely untouched. Like so many perfectly engineered solutions to problems I no longer care about, it remains unopened. An ode to time well wasted.
Just beyond that folder, usually pacing around my desk, are the cats. They’re smarter than I am, arguably better dressed, and seemingly immune to imposter syndrome. They don’t write code, but if they did, I suspect it would be in Lisp. They seem to understand that walking helps me to think, trailing behind as if humouring me on my daily laps through ideas and low-stakes epiphanies. When really, they are quietly and very deliberately shepherding me to the cupboard where they know I keep the packets of Felix party mix. And if you dare head for the kettle, my dog will very firmly push you in towards the fridge to retrieve her a drop of milk. So, in case you're wondering if I'm making coffee or tea, the answer is yes. Strong enough to cauterise regret.
Things I Swear I’ll Finish (Eventually)
I’m knee-deep in Bubble Tea (the CharmBracelet TUI framework) and maintain two pet projects: one is BMX, a tmux/Kubernetes context manager masquerading as a terminal app; the other is Delorian, a UI for fluxcd CLI that I keep rewriting instead of finishing. The UX is somewhere between nostalgia and Stockholm Syndrome.
I’m also still failing, heroically and repeatedly, at cracking Kryptos K4, the final unsolved section of the CIA’s backyard sculpture cipher. I’ve broken everything except the part that actually matters. I take comfort in knowing I’m not alone, just possibly more stubborn than is strictly healthy.
And yes, one day I’ll finish that viola concerto that’s been sitting in a folder titled “definitely_not_abandoned.” It’s coming along slowly, much like the rest of this blog.
Expect posts on any of the above, plus the occasional dog photo for morale. Kahlúa, naturally, will appear throughout, sometimes in photographs, often in anecdotes, and always somewhere just off-screen, plotting her next snack-based power play.
If you’ve made it this far, congratulations. You’re either profoundly curious or mildly unwell. Either way, welcome to the lab. Just don’t breathe too deep, or you might inherit a side project.