About

I'm a Principal DevOps Engineer based in Germany. Most of my work comes down to one thing: building platforms that teams can ship on without ever thinking about the infrastructure underneath. If a developer has to open a ticket to get something deployed, I've failed at my job.

My opinion on infrastructure is pretty simple. It should be declarative, self-healing, and boring. The best platform is the one nobody talks about because it just works. I spend my days making Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud environments do exactly that.

Outside of work, I run a Kubernetes homelab on Raspberry Pis. It's where I break things on purpose so I don't break them at work. Muscle memory matters when you're debugging a failing node at 2am. I've also been pulling AI tooling into my daily workflow, not for the hype, but because it genuinely cuts hours off repetitive infrastructure tasks.

Stack

Platform Engineering

KubernetesK3sFluxCDHelmDockerKustomize

CI/CD

Azure DevOpsGitHub ActionsGitOpsWorkload Identity

Cloud & Infra

AzureCloudflareOpenTofucert-manager

Homelab

Raspberry Pi 5Synology NASUbiquitiProxmox

AI & Automation

Claude CodeLLM PipelinesPython

Frontend

SvelteKitTailwind CSSTypeScript

How I got here

From Ops to Platform Engineering

I started out in traditional ops, manually configuring servers and writing runbooks that nobody read. At some point I realized I was solving the same problems over and over, just on different machines. That's when I started treating infrastructure as code and building self-service platforms instead of fielding tickets all day.

The homelab that changed everything

Running a homelab on actual hardware taught me things no cloud sandbox ever could. When your Raspberry Pi cluster loses a node because of a bad SD card, you learn real fast how important proper failover is. It's low-stakes enough to experiment freely but close enough to production to build instincts that transfer directly to work.

AI as a daily tool

I was skeptical about AI tooling for infrastructure work until I actually tried it. Now I use it to generate boilerplate Helm charts, draft IaC modules, review pull requests, and automate the stuff that used to eat my afternoons. It's not magic. It's a good calculator for code, and it lets me focus on the problems that actually need a human brain.

Got a project in mind?

I'm always up for a good conversation about platforms, automation, or DevOps. Book a call.

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Rico Twesten-Weber

Principal DevOps Engineer. I build platforms that run themselves, and write about DevOps and AI.

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