Hi, I'm
Engineering Leader · Builder · Bitcoiner
17+ years building production systems at scale. I lead engineering teams, architect distributed platforms, and obsess over infrastructure that runs well and costs less. Currently a Technical Manager at Head Digital Works.
I write about AWS, self-hosting, Bitcoin sovereignty, and the thinking behind hard decisions.
Replaced $40K/month Datadog + $40K/month CloudWatch with a self-built Grafana LGTM stack. ~$120K/month prospective savings across 15 departments at 6 TB/day.
Architected a targeting engine with Java 21 virtual threads processing millions of events at <500ms p99.
Right-sizing, Karpenter, Graviton, and lifecycle policies across production infrastructure. Zero performance loss.
Run my own Kubernetes clusters, observability stack, and services on bare metal. No cloud lock-in.
Technical deep dives, building in public, Bitcoin, and first-principles thinking.
Bare metal Kubernetes can be 5x cheaper than AWS — but it's wrong for most teams. I run 6 Hetzner nodes; here's the honest tradeoff and decision framework.
Observability cost $80K/month at 1TB/day — $40K Datadog, $40K CloudWatch. A year later at 6× the data, the self-hosted LGTM stack I built still ran $15-18K. The teardown.
A real observability architecture at scale: the LGTM stack moving ~6 TB of telemetry a day across 15 departments — microservices mode, sharding, S3 tiering, retention, and cardinality control.
