Welcome🔗

Hi! My name's Rareș, and you're very welcome to my corner of the web. On most platforms I go by rarescosma, but sometimes also karelian. I was born in Romania, but became a Swedish citizen in 2024.

In 2011, I got a Masters in Digital Networks following a Bachelors in Telecommunications.

In my early university years I taught myself web development for some extra pocket capital. Small WordPress sites led to bigger ones and soon I picked up skills for running elephant-traffic sites in production.

At Sony Mobile, my love for performance met with my teenage-years Linux passion as I advanced to take charge of the entire platform as one of the earliest DevOps engineers.

Next, I switched gears and joined Klarna, in Stockholm, where I did systems programming, developed a monitoring platform and honed my Kubernetes skills.

I like automation, site reliability, loosely coupled systems & performance optimization.

I also value simplicity and efficiency. Broken, undocumented and accidentally complex things waste everyone's time.

I believe in optimizing processes and solid engineering as a good way to spend our time, over pushing for getting things done the "quick and dirty way".

As a platform engineer, the best thing one can hear: "Wow, I don't know what you did, but X works much faster now!"

Where X represents part of the product itself, either optimized with an SRE mindset, or part of a development loop that took way too long and hampered fellow engineers' ability to iterate fast.

I like the idea of building large complex systems while keeping them still reliable and fast by composing together small simple pieces that make sense individually, often catalogued as "boring" tech.

The UNIX philosophy, Urbit's precepts and Bill de hÓra's principles have greatly inspired to me over the years.

When not coding, I like to walk, swim, bike, lift and sometimes climb. No matter how much capital some might accrue, if they don't put in the hard work of staying fit, some of our planet's most awesome landscapes will remain inaccessible for them.

On this website you'll find a showcase of projects that kept me busy lately, a couple of long(ish) form articles on DevOps/Linux/networking tech topics, but also a sort of travelogue / photo gallery of my latest adventures.

If you'd like to reach out:

When Mother Earth catches a bad case of industrialization, She fights it off with a fever.

-- Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness