I'm Fernando Meyer, a Principal Software Engineer based in Berlin. I work on the systems underneath the systems: datastores, provisioning stacks, platform infrastructure. The kind of work where a bad design decision compounds quietly across thousands of clusters before it becomes someone else's incident.
My path here wasn't straight. I started in rules engines and NLP, worked on search infrastructure, built data pipelines and classification systems. Over time I kept gravitating toward the layer that everything else depends on, and eventually that became my full focus: distributed datastores and the platform machinery around them.
I write here about database internals, distributed systems, and the unglamorous craft of keeping stateful infrastructure alive in production. Occasionally about engineering leadership, because the hardest part of platform work is usually getting the rest of the organization to care about it before something breaks. Sometimes about the math hiding inside everyday things.
I'm also pursuing an MSc in Computer Science, filling in the formal gaps that two decades of production systems tend to leave, plus a math undergrad on the side, one credit per Olympics.
Other interests
- Mathematics: geometry, algebra, topology. I like finding the math hiding inside practical problems.
- Music production: synthesis, sound design, and anything that makes interesting noise.
- Hacking & tinkering: hardware projects, reverse engineering, CTFs.
- F1: the engineering, the strategy, the drama.
- Reading: especially on e-ink.