Hello World

If you're a developer, you know that moment. That classic console.log("Hello World") that marks the beginning of something new. Well, consider this my verbose, overly-commented, production-ready version of that moment. Welcome to my blog—it's been a long time coming, and it's finally here.

Why Now?

For years, I've been that developer who learns something fascinating, builds something cool, debugs something infuriating, and then… keeps it all to myself. Sure, I'd share snippets with colleagues over coffee or drop knowledge bombs in Slack threads, but there was never a permanent record. No central repository for the late-night "aha!" moments or the battle scars from production incidents that taught me more than any textbook ever could.

So here we are. This blog is my attempt to document the journey—the experiments, the failures, the small victories, and everything in between. Think of it as my personal Git history, but with better commit messages and fewer merge conflicts.

What to Expect

I'm not here to write yet another "10 Tips to Become a Better Developer" listicle (though I reserve the right to occasionally break this promise). Instead, I want to share the real stuff:

• Fatherhood: Before a developer, I'm a father to the lovely Ruby and Verena and a husband to Vreni.
• Deep dives into distributed systems: How they break, how they heal, and how to sleep soundly knowing your monitoring setup has your back
• Rust adventures: My ongoing love affair with systems programming and why fighting the borrow checker at 2 AM somehow feels therapeutic
• Enterprise realities: Because building software for millions of users at large organizations comes with its own special flavor of chaos and constraints
• Observability and performance: Metrics, traces, logs, and the art of actually understanding what your system is trying to tell you
• The intersection of hardware and software: Yes, I used to wire up smart homes and program logic circuits. That background shapes how I think about software more than you'd expect
• Football rants: From sunday league escapades, rants about my national football team, expect to hear about all the bad weekends and occasional wins.

A Bit About the Journey

My path to software engineering wasn't exactly linear. I started with an electrical engineering degree in Kenya, spent time literally wiring buildings and programming industrial control systems, then pivoted fully into web development. From building e-commerce sites in Nairobi to consulting for German enterprise clients, I've touched enough different parts of the tech stack to have strong opinions and the scars to back them up.

These days, I split my time between delivering Spring Boot microservices and Angular frontends for enterprise clients, and obsessively optimizing Rust code in my spare time. It's a balance—the pragmatic and the idealistic, the "it works" and the "it's beautiful." Both are important. Both will show up here.

Who This Is For

Honestly? This blog is as much for me as it is for you. Writing forces clarity. Teaching reveals gaps in understanding. But if you're a developer who:

• Gets excited about system design and architecture patterns
• Cares about performance but also acknowledges that premature optimization is still a sin
• Appreciates the beauty of well-instrumented code
• Believes that understanding why something works is just as important as making it work
• Enjoys the occasional detour into hardware, protocols, or low-level systems

…then you're in the right place. Pull up a chair. Let's figure this stuff out together.

What's Next?

I have a backlog of topics longer than my production incident post-mortems (and trust me, those get verbose). Expect articles on building resilient microservices, implementing effective observability, navigating the Rust ecosystem, and probably some opinionated takes on why certain "best practices" aren't always best.

The cadence? We'll see. I'm not going to promise weekly posts if I can't deliver them. Quality over quantity. But I am committed to showing up and sharing what I'm learning, building, and occasionally breaking.

So here's to new beginnings, to finally hitting "publish," and to the wonderful mess that is modern software development. Welcome to the blog. Let's build something interesting.