I build systems that people depend on. Over the past twenty-plus years I’ve had to make infrastructure behave in places where downtime is not an option, financial platforms moving real money, aerospace systems with zero tolerance for error, large-scale gaming and retail systems under unpredictable load, and enterprise environments where audit and regulation shape the architecture as much as technology does.

My work spans both extremes of the stack. Close to the machine: Linux kernel mechanisms, namespaces, cgroups, eBPF, network/socket engineering, segmentation, and performance tuning with real latency targets. And at the same time, high-level distributed systems: event-driven architectures, Kafka internals, consensus and replication models, multi-model consistency, and the trade-offs required to make distributed systems correct and stable instead of merely “working on paper.”

Security isn’t an afterthought in my career, I have designed PKI and certificate authority infrastructures (RA/CA) for regulated industries, built cryptographic pipelines where compromise is existential, and implemented governance and operational practices around ciphers, rotation, and issuance that stand up in audits, not just whiteboards.

I write here because almost everything I learned about building real systems was learned the hard way, on platforms that could not fail. Tutorials rarely capture the constraints that matter, compliance, latency budgets, rollback risk, cross-team failures, or the invisible cost of complexity.

If I can make that knowledge explicit for someone else earlier in their career, that is worth doing.