About

It started with games. I was fascinated by computers as a child, and the more I used things like Google, Facebook and YouTube, the more I wanted to know what was behind them — how the web actually worked, and how systems at that size get built at all. During my Bachelor’s that curiosity turned into the thing I wanted to do for a living.

I still think it is the most interesting question in the job. Every system I have worked on is somebody’s answer to it, and the answers are never obvious.

I build backend systems — the APIs, the data models, and the logic underneath them. Most of my professional work so far has been business software: HR and payroll platforms, recruitment systems, and internal applications a company depends on to operate.

That kind of system has its own shape of difficulty. It is usually not traffic; it is the number of rules, the number of exceptions to those rules, and how much of an organisation depends on getting them right. A payroll calculation that is wrong for one department is a different kind of failure from a slow page, and it has taught me to treat correctness and clarity as design goals rather than afterthoughts.

I do not want that to be the only kind of system I know how to build. The problems that come from scale interest me just as much — throughput and latency, distribution, keeping state consistent across services — and that is where most of my own projects and reading go.

The work has mostly been in .NET Core over SQL Server, with Clean Architecture, CQRS and Domain-Driven Design, alongside a fair amount of legacy modernisation. Where I have done it is on the home page.

Writing is how I find out whether I actually understand something. If I cannot explain why a decision was made and what it cost, I did not understand the decision. Putting it in public also means the reasoning can be checked by people who know more than I do.

Most of what I publish is about .NET Core, architecture patterns, databases and performance. You can read it here.