I'm David. I work on infrastructure, automation, and the layer everything else sits on top of. Usually I just make things work.

Who I am

I'm 33, in Vienna, about fifteen years into this. It started with C# at 16 and was almost all automation — bots that did things on the web so I didn't have to, scrapers, something to play a browsergame while I was at school. The subject matter changed. The instinct didn't.

I studied at TU Wien and freelanced alongside it, then spent 2018 to 2024 consulting my way through a lot of very different rooms: Atlassian customisation, Spring Boot services, Angular frontends, a great deal of DevOps, and a run of Kubernetes migrations that ended in a multi-cluster platform for a large Austrian telco. Then a year freelancing in the public sector — Puppet, another OpenShift migration, delivery processes built to fit the teams using them.

Since mid-2025 I'm co-founder and CTO of Aximote, a driving app that scores your trips and tracks what they really cost. I started deep in Android Automotive and a Flutter app, then leaned back into infrastructure and moved our stack off a PaaS onto Hetzner. Hands-on across all of it, and carrying most of the architecture.

All over the place, then, with a heart for infrastructure and automation. What I enjoy is making other people's work go faster and keeping systems alive — on-call included. Day to day that's Kotlin, Kubernetes and Postgres; the rest is on the uses page.

What I write here

Things I build and things I break — migrations, incidents, homelab notes, small tools, whatever I spent the last week inside. Writing doesn't come easily to me, so I don't hold to one format: some posts are long, some are three paragraphs and a config file. Recurring subjects are infrastructure that got simpler instead of more complex, underrated self-hosted software, Postgres at sizes that start to hurt, Android Automotive, and what happens when you let coding agents run a chunk of your homelab.

A few things I've come to believe by watching them go wrong. Microservices for a single team are almost always a bad trade. DRY and KISS make sense until they don't — some repetition is cheaper than an abstraction everyone then has to work through. And Kubernetes rarely fails for technical reasons; it fails when the people running it lack the experience, the headcount, or the agency to run it properly.

Get in touch

If I wrote about something you're working on, or something where you know more than I do, I'd like to hear about it. Corrections especially — I'd rather be right than look right.