The person behind the boring.

I live in Amsterdam and build and lead infrastructure organisations for a living. Before any of that I spent seven years teaching Linux in Minsk — 200+ engineers, a university programme I co-founded, and one lesson that stuck: if you can’t explain a system to a sleepy classroom at 9am, you don’t understand it yet. I’ve been simplifying systems ever since — at PandaDoc, WorkFusion, Flo Health, Miro, a year inside ABN AMRO’s fintech New10, and now Manychat.

“Boring” is the highest compliment in my line of work: boring infrastructure means the product team gets to be the exciting one. Off duty I chase the opposite — a Fujifilm X-E5 that comes along everywhere, streets worth photographing twice, trips without a runbook, and the occasional new toy in a white box.

How I lead.

Four principles, each one lived before it was written down.

01
Blameless, with teeth
A post-mortem that produces a document is theatre; one that produces a shipped fix is engineering. Action items get owners, deadlines — and priority over feature work when they target a repeating failure.
02
Platforms build leverage, not ticket queues
The platform team owns the paved road; product teams own their services. Get that boundary right and every improvement multiplies across the company. Get it wrong and you’ve hired a help desk.
03
Explain it or you don’t own it
Seven years of teaching before industry left a rule: if you can’t explain a system to a sleepy classroom at 9am, you don’t understand it yet. Clarity is a leadership tool, not a nice-to-have.
04
The best person in every role
And the perfect role for every person. Teams are configurations — aligned to reality, then realigned when reality changes. Nobody grows in a seat that fits somebody else.

How I'm wired.

CliftonStrengths Top 5, unedited. It explains more about how I run infrastructure than any job title does.

01
Arranger Executing
A conductor's talent: aligning people and resources until the configuration is right — then realigning when reality changes. It's why "team topology" is my favourite migration tool.
02
Activator Influencing
"When can we start?" Analysis has its uses, but only action is real. Decide, act, look at the result, learn. It's why every story on this site starts mid-problem.
03
Individualisation Relationship
Intrigued by what makes each person unique — and how different people can work together productively. The best person in every role; the perfect role for every person.
04
Input Strategic thinking
A need to collect and archive: information, ideas, artefacts, relationships. Also explains the camera, the photo archive, and why every story on this site leads with a number.
05
Restorative Executing
Adept at dealing with problems: figuring out what's wrong and fixing it. The whole career in one word — companies outgrow their systems, I restore the balance.