Hi, David here. I mostly work on infrastructure, automation, and the layer everything else sits on top of. In general, I just make things work.

Who I am

I'm 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, browsergame bots, you name it. Nowadays things are a bit more serious, the approach is the same though.

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, AWS and a run of Kubernetes migrations that ended in a multi-cluster platform for a large Austrian telco. Then another year freelancing in the public sector: Puppet, more OpenShift migrations, delivery processes built to actually 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, but infrastructure called me back when we moved our stack off a PaaS onto Hetzner. Now I'm 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 and lately Claude Code; the rest is on the uses page.

What I write here

Writing my thoughts about things I build and things I break. Migrations, incidents, homelab experiments, 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 might be long, some are three paragraphs and a config file.

Recurring topics: 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 coding agents run a chunk of your homelab.

Some hot takes?

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.
  • Kubernetes rarely fails for technical reasons. It fails when the people running it lack the experience, headcount, or 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.