I didn't plan a move into infrastructure. It happened one problem at a time. Whenever a service I'd written was hard to deploy, debug, or secure, the fix was usually one layer below where I was working.

Starting with a product

Before iDBI, I was CTO at University Mobile Assistant, a small startup where I built the first version of the product with Laravel and Vue.js. A small team has no separate platform group. Whoever writes the code also works out where it runs.

The backend years

I joined iDBI in 2018 as a backend developer working with PHP, Laravel, and AWS, and later became a senior full-stack developer writing PHP, Go, and Python. What stayed with me from that work was data integrity and backward compatibility: changes that look small in a pull request and turn out to matter a lot to everyone who depends on them.

I also started mentoring junior developers. It taught me more about explaining a decision than any design document did.

Moving into the platform

As Lead Developer and Platform Engineer, most of my work moved below the application. We moved services to a multi-account AWS architecture, brought in Terraform so new environments and white-label deployments came from code instead of checklists, and adopted HashiCorp Vault for secrets. I also designed a company-wide authentication system on OAuth2 and OpenID Connect, with a Go backend and a Next.js frontend.

Running all of it

Since July 2024 I've been Head of DevOps. So far that has meant leading the migration from AWS to Azure, running production on Kubernetes and Linux, building CI/CD in Jenkins and TeamCity, and setting up a central observability platform. Most of the job is making production something the whole team can understand, whatever tools it runs on.

What carried over

Writing software for years made me a better operator, because I know what a developer wants from a deployment pipeline and which error messages help during an incident. The next posts cover specific pieces of that work: the cloud migration, the observability stack, and a small tunneling tool we built ourselves.