Who is this chap?

I’m Adam, though thanks to a childhood typo (and cosmic irony), I’ve gone by Adad ever since - the Akkadian version of Iškur (see above). I'm a cloud/platform engineer and a Distinguished Engineer (FDE) at Fujitsu. I'm also a drummer, chronic orophile, beer snob, and theological pun enjoyer masquerading as a philosopher. Forgive the eccentricity; my head is often in the clouds.

(Yeah, I tried that in the banner. Looked way too pretentious, so instead, here's a photo of me looking a bit bewildered beside Lake Oeschinen, in Switzerland.)

What is this place?

Primarily somewhere to brain-dump, secondarily a living portfolio.

I have literally dozens of stray .txt files on my hard drive in which I have bluntly regurgitated everything from technical opinions, ideas, best practices, to philosophical musings and personal moral codes. My hope is that a site like this forces me to structure my thoughts a little more, and maybe even that said thoughts reach others in the process.

Tech

I tend to market myself as someone who can juggle stability and experimentality. I can (and have) maintained, secured and optimised mission-critical distributed systems, but I've also been known to dabble with new or niche languages, libraries, platforms and patterns, and championed them to achieve change. To name a few:

  • Picked up SvelteKit and built some tooling to reduce friction when deploying SvelteKit apps to the cloud, with IaC. This site is built with it.
  • Designed and shared new patterns for platform engineering at scale with OpenTofu.
  • Have architected and engineered various crafty ways of saving big money on AWS networking costs.

I'm a big fan of modular architectures, platform abstraction, and hygienic IaC. I have many lesser-known yet battle-tested opinions on how to write good Terraform, and how to optimise your workflow when engineering on AWS.

You can find various bits of all these technical musings on the Tech blog.

Thoughts

Controversial to do so, I suppose, but I thought I might as well use this space to jot down my various non-techy thoughts and opinions as well.

I'm a staunch advocate of critical thinking, openness to experience, autodidactism and experiential learning. More broadly, I believe metacognition is perhaps the single most valuable skill you can practice.

To this end, I suppose I have some unconventional opinions, at times. Though I quite doubt anything I say or believe in would be overly controversial, I will at least disclaim that I may on occasion express my perspectives in the Thoughts blog.

Above all, I believe in having a diplomatic but rational dialogue with everything. People who can profoundly disagree without disembowelling each other can have my heart instead.