Hi, I'm Norris 👋 - a Principal Solution Architect who helps institutions navigate the messy middle ground between legacy systems and cloud-native platforms.
My work hours are usually spent working with regulated institutions (think government, insurance, energy) in Germany, helping them modernize their software systems without breaking what already works. It's the kind of work where you need to understand both distributed systems and the ins and outs of a 15 year old ERP system, which has been single handedly kept alive by "Brent" (small nod to the fantastic book "Phoenix Project").
What This Blog Is About
But this blog isn't about my day job - it's my tech journal for working through ideas I'm curious about.
I learn best by building and writing things down. Sometimes that means documenting how I set up my homelab. Other times it's rewriting an existing app in Elixir (or Rust, or whatever I'm exploring) just to understand the tradeoffs. I write about lessons learned the hard way, patterns that clicked for me, and my thoughts on trends like AI that everyone's talking about but few are actually building with.
This is where I keep notes on what I'm learning and building - the kind of technical write-ups I wish I'd found when I was googling at 2am. If you're into homelabs, tinkering with new languages, or just enjoy reading about someone else's technical experiments, you might find something useful here.
No polished thought leadership. Just notes of me learning new things. So be warned - some posts might be rough around the edges.