About
The person behind this site.
I'm Marco. I work as an infrastructure engineer at a fintech company in Berlin, where I spend most of my time on the platform team — the group responsible for making it easier for product engineers to deploy, observe, and operate services without needing to understand every layer of the stack.
Before this I spent four years at a logistics startup in Amsterdam that grew from 30 to 400 people. I joined when we had two services and one database. I left when we had 60 services, three Kafka clusters, and a dedicated SRE rotation. That period taught me more about distributed systems than any course or book, mostly by repeatedly demonstrating what happens when you get things wrong at scale.
What I write about
Mostly what I encounter in my work and can't stop thinking about afterward. Kafka consumer group rebalancing. Postgres connection pool behavior under load. The organizational dynamics of on-call. The gap between what monitoring dashboards show and what's actually happening in a system.
I try to write about specifics: numbers, configurations, actual error messages, the sequence of events during an incident. The general advice is easy to find. The "here's exactly what happened and what I tried" is harder.
Background
Computer science degree from TU Berlin. Started as a backend developer writing Java, moved toward infrastructure when I realized I was more interested in how services ran than what they did. Have worked with Kubernetes since 1.12, which means I have opinions about upgrade strategies and a reflexive discomfort around anything marked "alpha".
Outside work: trail running in the Grunewald, an ongoing project to read the Postgres documentation end to end (currently in the internals section), and keeping a small home lab running on three second-hand ThinkCentre machines.
This site
Hand-written HTML and CSS, served by nginx. No JavaScript. I wrote about the setup in the colophon. The name "polvero" is a rough Italianization of nothing in particular — I wanted something that sounded like a domain rather than a brand, and this was available.
Contact
marco [at] polvero.site. I read everything; I reply slowly.