Engineering Manager. Backend person. Occasional infrastructure overthinker. I like systems that are boring in production and interesting only during design reviews.
Most of my best code lives in private repos.
Some of it is probably better that way.✅ Simple before clever
✅ Observable before mysterious
✅ Working software before architectural theatre
✅ Clear ownership before heroic debugging
✅ Boring tech before impressive incident reports
| Area | My bias |
|---|---|
| Backend systems | Make boundaries obvious |
| Reliability | Measure before guessing |
| Developer experience | Remove friction quietly |
| Infrastructure | Automate the boring pain |
| Engineering management | Context, clarity, ownership |
| Product engineering | Ship the right thing, not just more things |
❌ clever code that needs a documentary
❌ microservices created for emotional reasons
❌ dashboards nobody checks
❌ "temporary" hacks from three jobs ago
❌ ownership described as "everyone"
❌ meetings that could have been a failing testflowchart TD
A[Something is broken] --> B{Do we have logs?}
B -- No --> C[Add logs and regret past choices]
B -- Yes --> D{Do we trust the logs?}
D -- No --> E[Fix observability first]
D -- Yes --> F[Find boring root cause]
F --> G[Write it down]
G --> H[Delete unnecessary complexity]
The best incident is the one prevented by boring decisions.
The second best is the one with good logs.
The worst is the one where someone says:
"Who owns this service?"This is not an open-source trophy cabinet.
It is mostly a public parking spot for:
- side quests
- experiments
- notes
- small tools
- repos that survived contact with real life
Most meaningful work happens in teams, private codebases, architecture discussions, production incidents, migrations, and the occasional “why is this still running?” investigation.
⚙️ Building SaaS ideas
☁️ Thinking about cloud architecture
🧪 Learning Go properly
🤖 Exploring AI-assisted engineering workflows
🧹 Deleting imaginary complexity wherever possible- GitHub: @samdervis you are probably her, already
- LinkedIn: sodhiambo
Build clearly.
Lead responsibly.
Keep systems understandable.
Avoid unnecessary nonsense.