Build it, then run it.
I design, build and run end-to-end platforms. Every practice I bring to a client is one I've tested on my own first — in production, not on a slide.
Build it, then run it
I don't hand a design over the wall and leave. I write the infrastructure, ship the pipelines, and stay on to operate the thing — the Azure bill included. Owning the whole loop is what keeps the design honest: anything fragile turns up on my own pager first. Carddex is the standing proof — a trading-card market-data and e-commerce platform I've founded and run since September 2023, across several clouds and 15+ regions. It's in production, not a demo.
AI-augmented delivery
The way I build now is agentic. I direct AI agents that do much of the designing, coding, testing and operating — under my review, against the same guardrails a team would enforce. A lean, AI-augmented setup ships and runs what would normally take a team, without cutting corners on tests, docs or security. I proved it on my own platform before bringing it to anyone else's: 30+ repos, everything as code, delivered this way. That's the edge a client would feel.
Platform principles
Everything as code — infrastructure, monitoring and CI/CD all Terraform-managed, so the platform stays reviewable, reproducible and diffable. Keyless by default: Azure Managed Identity federating into GCP Workload Identity Federation, secrets in Key Vault, nothing long-lived. Automated coverage gates, so quality doesn't ride on someone's discipline. FinOps as a habit, not a fire drill — repeated optimisation rounds have taken roughly 20% off the cloud bill. None of it is Azure-only: the same code delivers on AWS, GCP, Digital Ocean or on-prem. No lock-in.
No hype, just the running system
I'd rather show you a system in production than a deck about one. The numbers I quote come from platforms I actually operate, and they're rounded down rather than up — I can show you the Terraform and the dashboards behind each one. The practices I recommend are ones I've already broken and fixed on my own systems. If something's still a work in progress, I'll say so plainly. That's the whole pitch — substance you can inspect, not adjectives.
What I reach for.
Prepare, pace, respect the risk.
Off the clock I train for ultra-distance mountain races — Marathon des Sables across the Sahara, 100-mile mountain ultras, a 70.3. Same rules as the engineering: prepare, pace, respect the risk. I built the tools for it too — 3dtrails, which turns a route I've already run, ridden or hiked into a physical keepsake: it takes the finished GPS track and renders it as a 3D-printable, framable art piece of the terrain and the line — and the calendar I keep every race in: races.juliankramer.nl.