Writing
Field notes from twenty years of building regulated systems: streaming, fraud prevention, energy infrastructure, and what leading engineers through all of it actually costs.
- Shipping at Upgrid
Merge to main, live in four minutes. How I ship at Upgrid — 1,400 PRs, a small team, and a cadence that picked up in the last two quarters.
- Engineering at Upgrid
Next.js, Supabase, Linear, Steep, PostHog, Better Stack. A tour of the Upgrid stack — how a small team ships Swiss energy billing without a microservice estate.
- Building Upgrid
Co-founding Upgrid as CTO: a Swiss energy-community platform where billing law, metering data, and go-to-market share the same correctness bar as fintech.
- Rebuilding Fraud Prevention from Scratch in Six Months
How N26 replaced a static rule engine spread across dozens of microservices with a stateful Apache Flink pipeline in six months: new-rule lead time from 4 weeks–6 months to ~2 weeks, payment to decision in ~52ms.
- Say Yes First
A product engineer brings a small tooling idea to platform. The default response — no, not now, here's why it won't work — builds a wall. There's a better one.
- I Hardly Debug Anymore
I used to relaunch the app five times to check one change. TDD felt like homework until the feedback loop clicked — now tests are how I think, not what I do after.
- Stop Complaining About Code Freezes
Code freezes feel like arbitrary bureaucracy — until you're the one on call during the holidays. The real reason companies do them isn't what most engineers think.
- Engineering at N26
Nine thousand containers, two hundred microservices, one licensed EU bank. An insider tour of how N26's stack actually worked — and the parts we hadn't finished yet.
- Straight Out of the Bootcamp
You finished the program. Now what? Stop collecting certificates. Build something recruiters can click. Prepare like interviews are the job — because for a while, they are.