Hey there! 👋 I'm Dominic

Technical Leader | Software Developer | Platform Engineer | Sour Candy Enthusiast 🍬

I spend my days making complex systems simple and helping teams fall in love with their developer tools. Right now I'm deep in the weeds of making infrastructure feel less like infrastructure and more like magic.

What I'm About 🚀

I'm the person teams call when their "simple" platform has become a hydra of microservices, and they need someone who speaks both engineer and executive. After nearly 20 years in this beautiful chaos we call software development, I've learned that the best platforms feel invisible — they just work, and they make everything else work better.

My superpower? I see patterns where others see problems. Whether it's writing code that untangles a deployment nightmare or architecting systems that scale with your team's ambition, I turn technical complexity into competitive advantage.

Current Adventures 🌟

🔬 Research & Innovation

• Image-based volume mounting in Kubernetes — Because managing persistent storage shouldn't require a PhD
• ML/AI infrastructure patterns — Making machine learning deployments as reliable as traditional apps
• Event-driven architecture evolution — Designing systems that react, don't just respond

🎯 Active Projects

• Building developer platforms that teams actually want to use
• Crafting Rust-based reverse proxies for high-performance edge computing
• Optimizing cloud costs without sacrificing performance
• Implementing "medium-grained" authorization patterns in API gateways

✍️ Sharing Knowledge

• Writing about platform engineering patterns and anti-patterns
• Speaking at conferences about developer experience optimization
• Mentoring engineering leaders through platform transformations

My Greatest Hits 🏆

🔐 Democratized Internet Security — Led the first-ever Let's Encrypt integration at a hosting provider, making SSL certificates free for millions of websites. Sometimes the biggest impact comes from removing barriers.

💰 The 30% Cost Reduction Without Compromise — Redesigned cloud infrastructure for applications serving millions of users, proving that optimization and reliability aren't mutually exclusive.

🎭 The Platform Transformation — Guided enterprises through monolith-to-microservices migrations while keeping the lights on and the teams sane.

👥 Building Teams That Build Better — Mentored engineers into technical leaders, proving that investing in people is the highest-ROI platform improvement.

How I Think About Technology 🧠

The Platform-as-Product Philosophy

Every internal platform needs a product manager — even if that's you.

I believe platforms should be built with the same rigor as customer-facing products:

• User research (aka talking to your developers)
• Feature prioritization (because you can't build everything)
• Success metrics (adoption rates, time-to-productivity, happiness scores)
• Continuous iteration (platforms are never "done")

My Engineering Principles

⚖️ Impact Over Effort — Not all improvements are created equal. Focus on high-leverage changes.

🪄 Automate The Annoying — If it takes more than 30 seconds and you do it more than once a week, automate it.

🌈 Extensible > Flexible — Build for today's problems with tomorrow's expansion in mind. YAGNI, but with escape hatches.

💖 The Boy Scout Rule — Always leave the codebase better than you found it. Small improvements compound.

🧱 Tests Are Your Foundation — Not documentation. Tests tell you what the system actually does, not what you hope it does.

🧰 Technical Debt Is A Tool — Like any tool, it's about using it thoughtfully and paying it back with interest.

📝 Documentation Is Decision Insurance — Good docs aren't about what the code does — they're about why decisions were made. The traceability of changes and decisions saves future developers (including yourself) from reinventing the wheel or repeating mistakes.

Tech Stack & Tools 🛠️

I'm language-agnostic but opinionated about patterns. Here's what's in my current toolkit:

Core Languages

const myStack = {
  // What I build with daily
  backend: ["Java/Spring Boot", "Go", "Lua", "Rust"],
  frontend: ["TypeScript/Javascript", "React"],
  
  // What I automate with
  scripting: ["Python", "Bash", "GitLab CI"],
  infrastructure: ["Helm", "Terraform", "ArgoCD", "YAML"],
  
  // What I store things in
  databases: ["PostgreSQL", "MongoDB", "Redis"],
  
  // What keeps me sane
  tools: ["Linux", "Terminal", "Container", "VS Code", "IntelliJ IDEA", "Git"]
}

Platform Technologies

• Orchestration: Kubernetes, OpenShift, AKS
• Cloud: Azure (expert), AWS (proficient), GCP (learning)
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Jenkins, Azure DevOps
• Monitoring: Prometheus + Grafana, ELK Stack, Azure Monitor

Current Learning Queue

• WebAssembly for edge computing
• Rust for systems programming
• Advanced Kubernetes operators
• eBPF for observability

Let's Connect! 🤝

I'm always up for discussing:

• Platform engineering challenges and solutions
• Software architecture decisions that actually matter
• Team scaling strategies that actually work
• Technical leadership lessons learned (often the hard way)
• The best sour candy varieties 🍬 (surprisingly contentious topic)

Find Me Here

📧 Email: dominic@snowgarden.ch — Best for project discussions
💼 LinkedIn: Connect with me — Professional updates
🐙 GitHub: github.com/dol — Code and contributions
🦋 Bluesky: @drdol.bsky.social — Tech thoughts and random musings

What Others Say 💬

"Dominic has this rare ability to see the forest and the trees—he can architect a solution and then roll up his sleeves to implement it."

"He doesn't just build platforms, he builds the culture around them. His teams actually enjoy using the tools he creates."

"Brought order to our chaos without sacrificing our ability to move fast. That's a special skill."

Fun Facts About Me 🎨

• I believe the best technical decisions are made while enjoying sour candy
• I still get excited when my code compiles on the first try (it's the little things)
• I've been building platforms since before "platform engineering" was a thing
• I sneak emojis into my conference badges to see which systems actually handle Unicode properly 🧪
• I think infrastructure should be boring so applications can be exciting
• My ideal day: morning focus time, afternoon coding, evening learning something new

Ready to chat about your platform challenges?

Drop me a line at dominic@snowgarden.ch — I'd love to hear what you're building.

P.S. — If you made it this far, you probably care about details as much as I do. We should definitely talk. 😊