I’m a programmer who got curious about infrastructure, and an infrastructure person who never stopped thinking like a programmer. Ignoring the line between “software” and “ops” is where my best ideas come from.
I believe in working in the open. Everything is a file, and the more I work with AI, the more that turns out to be a surprisingly strong foundation to build on. Git fits naturally into that: history is preserved, anything can be diffed, anyone can look. That same thinking carries into how I present. My slides are written in code, version-controlled and publicly available, with the source linked for each talk below.
Talks
My public speaking profile is on Sessionize.
Upcoming
GitOps Needs an API - Swiss Cloud Native Day 2026 (17 September 2026)
Session details · Mount Gurten, Bern 🇨🇭
GitOps works well. Well enough that high-level business intent ends up in Git too: customer tenants, feature rollouts, access policies. The hard part is not storing it there. The hard part is expecting business stakeholders or customers to manage it through pull requests and raw YAML.
Reverse GitOps is an API-first pattern for exactly this problem. A typed Kubernetes API in front of your repo accepts structured intent through CRDs, without giving callers direct access to Git. A controller turns that intent into YAML files and commits them to Git. From there you keep the GitOps workflow you already trust: review, policy checks, CI, and a full audit trail.
I’ll demo this live using the open-source gitops-reverser operator, and close with an honest checklist: where this pattern shines (low-churn, high-impact configuration that needs review and audit), and where it is the wrong tool (high-frequency writes, tight latency requirements, or anything that belongs in a normal database).
Configuration Deserves a Software Delivery Process Too - Øredev 2026 (5 November 2026)
Session page · Malmö 🇸🇪
Configuration is often some of the most critical logic in a system, yet many teams manage it with far less discipline than code. It lives in databases, gets edited through admin screens, bypasses review, mixes awkwardly with secrets, and moves across environments with weak packaging boundaries. This talk argues configuration should be treated as a delivery problem, not just a storage problem: capture validated intent through an API, then turn it into configuration that is tested, packaged, versioned, signed, and promoted through environments as controlled artifacts.
(Ab)using the Kubernetes API as a Configuration Backend - Øredev 2026 (6 November 2026)
Session page · Malmö 🇸🇪
Configuration-heavy products keep reinventing the same backend machinery: typed objects, validation, permissions, audit trails, and some form of realtime change propagation. Over time, that configuration backend starts to look a lot like a control plane. This talk explores the Kubernetes API as a backend for configuration-heavy software products rather than as an infrastructure surface, including what the approach enables, which trade-offs it introduces, and where the model starts to break down.
Given
What If Every Cozystack Change Became a Commit? - CozySummit Virtual 2026 (26 May 2026)
CozySummit event · Slides: PDF · Watch on YouTube
Cozystack exposes platform services as Kubernetes API resources: Postgres, Redis, Bucket, Kubernetes. Users interact in the usual ways: kubectl, the Cozystack dashboard, or AI agents via MCP. But who is making all these changes, and why? Git seems far away. But it doesn’t have to be. What if every platform change automatically appeared as clean YAML in Git? Fully automated, a silent layer that turns API activity into a durable, readable history of infrastructure intent. Instead of digging through logs or dashboards, teams get versioned history they can inspect, diff, and share. The platform continuously writes its intent back to Git. Git stops being the interface and starts being the memory.
Who Tests the Configuration? - TestNet Spring Event (6 May 2026)
TestNet event (Dutch)
Much of what impacts production isn’t code but configuration: business rules, feature flags, content, rate limits, deployment settings, database connection details. Because configuration is so broad and scattered, it’s often unclear what falls under it, who can change it, and how to properly test those changes. This session shows why that’s a quality problem and how to make configuration changes visible, reviewable, and testable before production, using pull requests to spin up temporary environments for impact testing.
Reverse GitOps - KubeCon Co-located Event (23 March 2026)
KubeCon EU 2026 co-located session · Slides: PDF, Repo · Watch on YouTube
GitOps is well understood in one direction: desired state in Git, applied to a cluster. But what happens when you need it to work in reverse? When the cluster (or an operator) needs to write state back to Git? I introduced the concept of Reverse GitOps and walked through why it matters, where the current tooling falls short, and what a proper implementation looks like.
Bringing Pull Requests to Life with GitOps - dotned Saturday (May 2023)
How do you give a small team the deployment confidence of a much larger one? This talk showed how GitOps and ArgoCD let a 25-person company spin up a full temporary environment for every pull request, running integration tests against it automatically, deploying to production on success, and discarding the environment when done. Live demo included.
Podcast
The Power of GitOps, MongoDB Atlas en Kubernetes (Dutch)
A deep dive into using GitOps to drive the full lifecycle of MongoDB Atlas instances from Kubernetes: creation and deletion. We explored why this pattern is surprisingly powerful and how I managed to accidentally throw away a production database.
Training
I teach Kubernetes professionally through ICT Improve.
I teach these courses:
- Delivering Modern Cloud-Native Software: understand better how Kubernetes exactly can deploy your workloads into production
- Applied AI for Test Automation with Playwright: using AI to write and maintain browser tests
What I’m Working On
Apart from my consultancy/trainer work, I’ve also been working on Reverse GitOps: an idea that actors deserve an API to indicate their intent, while Git remains the source of record. There’s a write-up at reversegitops.dev and an open-source prototype at ConfigButler/gitops-reverser.