Hi, I'm Riddam.
Staff engineer in Amsterdam, working in cloud and application architecture. I build systems that hold up in production, read books worth remembering, and think about how to lead engineers well — and I write it all down here.
Latest
Leading Without Authority: Lessons from the Staff Engineer's Chair
What it takes to lead engineers when you have no reports — earning a mandate, writing ADRs that land, building a bench of complementary working styles, spending your vetoes, and encoding influence into defaults.
More writing
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How to let teams own their repositories and pipelines without the platform team becoming a ticket queue — declarative registries, validation that runs first, reconciliation with drift detection, and a lifecycle that includes retirement.
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What it takes to host a self-hosted CI platform properly — two agent tiers, queue-driven scaling, breaking the bootstrap dependency, stopping base-image drift, and making the server disposable.
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A production-safe rollout checklist for infrastructure that cannot be recreated quickly, including retention defaults, staged validation, and manual approval points.
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How to choose between transit routing and direct peering for managed database access, with practical decision criteria and routing guardrails.
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When multi-cloud is worth it (and when it isn't), and how to pick the tool that automates it — a practitioner's take on Terraform, OpenTofu, and Pulumi in 2026.
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A practical CI/CD design for monorepos with multiple infrastructure runtimes, focused on selective pipelines, safer promotion, and clean ownership boundaries.
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A practical 2026 reference covering fine-tuning techniques, alignment methods, training frameworks, data curation, distributed training, evaluation harnesses, model optimization, and the open-weight ecosystem.
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A practitioner's blueprint covering every layer of modern AI systems — foundation model selection, RAG, fine-tuning, agentic patterns, LLMOps, safety, cloud platforms, and the trade-offs behind each decision.
Explore
- Engineering Deep dives and write-ups from real work — cloud and application architecture, and the reasoning behind the decisions.
- Book Notes What I took away from books worth remembering, in my own words.
- Leadership On leading teams, growing engineers, and doing the work well.
- Playbooks In-depth references and blueprints I've built for certifications, architecture, and core topics — the material I share with the engineers I work with.