Hi, I'm Riddam.

I'm a staff engineer based in Amsterdam. For the past decade — across media and e-commerce — I've lived mostly in cloud and application architecture: designing systems that stay up when it matters, and helping the engineers around me build the same instinct.

These days my work sits where cloud architecture and AI meet — building on GCP and AWS, shaping data and ML pipelines, and working out how to make AI genuinely useful in production instead of merely impressive in a demo. I care most about the parts that never make the highlight reel: reliability, security, cost, and code the next person can actually maintain.

Much of the staff role is multiplying other people — mentoring, setting technical direction, and writing things down so a lesson only has to be learned once. This blog is part of that: it's where I share what I've learned, and, just as often, where I work out what I actually think.

Where to start

• 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.