About

I am Dario Kaufmann, a systems engineer based in Zürich. For the last eleven years I have been doing the same job with different titles: keeping services alive, making them cheaper to run, and figuring out why the thing broke at 3 a.m. and not at 3 p.m.

Most of my work has been at the unglamorous end of the stack: ingestion pipelines, batch jobs that must finish before the business day starts, the handful of servers that everything else quietly depends on. I like long-lived systems — the kind where the interesting problems start in year two, after the launch blog post has been forgotten.

The short version

• Eleven years of infrastructure and backend work.
• Currently platform engineering at a mid-size company near Zürich.
• Before that: a hosting shop, a logistics firm, and one brief, instructive stint at a startup whose name I am contractually discouraged from mentioning.
• I believe in boring technology, scheduled maintenance windows, and text files.

Colophon

This site is hand-written HTML and one CSS file. No build step, no framework, no analytics, no cookies, no JavaScript. The whole thing fits in a folder I can read end to end in one sitting, which I consider a feature. You can take the RSS feed and read it in any reader you like.

The design is deliberately plain: system fonts, one accent color, and markup that renders fine in links, text browsers, and print. If something looks off, that is a bug — tell me.

Speaking and writing elsewhere

Now and then I give a talk at local meetups, usually about operations topics nobody makes keynote material out of: cron, backups, migration checklists. I have also written a few guest posts for infrastructure newsletters. If you want me to talk at your meetup in Switzerland or southern Germany, write me.

Contact

Email is best: hello@dario.kaufmann.dev. I read everything and answer most things, slowly. I am also on Mastodon and keep code on GitHub under the same handle I have used since university, which I will not write out here because spam.