Welcome to My Blog

Hello, and thanks for stopping by.

I’m Dennis — an SRE / DevOps / platform engineer. If you’ve landed here from a search result for some obscure error string, I hope the post you came for saved you an afternoon. If you’re just looking around, here’s who’s writing.

How I think about problems

I’m a strong advocate of information-based planning and decision making. I like dealing with problems analytically: gather what’s actually true, then decide — rather than deciding first and collecting evidence to match.

Two beliefs follow from that, and they pull in opposite directions often enough to be interesting:

• Don’t fix a working system. Change has a cost, and “it could be cleaner” is not on its own a reason to touch something that works.
• Use what you have to its full potential. Most tools are underused rather than inadequate. Before reaching for a new one, it’s worth asking whether the current one was ever pushed.

I also think most software problems are solvable. It’s rare for something to be genuinely blocked by a system limitation — far more often the problem just hasn’t been looked at from the right angle yet. That’s usually a prompt to change perspective, not to give up.

On languages: Python is mine, and I think real depth in one language matters. But staying language-agnostic is what shows you the range of possible solutions to a problem. The second language is where you learn that your first one had opinions.

What I work on

Infrastructure. I’m part of a start-up, where I handle the IT side: choosing the software, designing the overall infrastructure, and then living with those decisions by managing and maintaining it. Owning the consequences of your own architecture is an excellent teacher.

Data. I care about clean, concise data and I’m realistic about how hard that is. The problems start earlier than most people expect — not at processing, but at deciding what to collect in the first place — and run all the way through cleaning, storage, processing, and reporting.

Whatever’s new. I like keeping up with where things are going, though mostly through a practical lens: can this actually be used, for my own ventures or at work?

Away from the keyboard

I mod games. There’s something satisfying about getting under the hood and tinkering with the files just to add a personal touch to something I’m already enjoying — which is, now that I write it down, not that different from what I do professionally.

I read a lot: technology books, self-help, and mystery, fantasy, and science fiction when I want to be somewhere else for a while. I’m also an anime and manga enthusiast, light novels included.

What to expect here

Mostly write-ups of things I’ve debugged or built, with the reasoning left in — including the parts where I was wrong, because that’s usually the useful bit. Some slide decks too.

Posts and decks written with AI help carry a visible marker, so you always know what you’re reading.

Have a look around.