About
I'm Nico, a backend developer based in Amsterdam. I've been writing software professionally for about nine years, mostly in Go these days, with a lot of Python before that and some Rust experiments happening in the background.
I work at a mid-sized SaaS company building internal tooling and data pipelines. Before that I was at a startup that made an inventory management product for small retailers. The startup folded, which was educational in the way that expensive things are educational.
I started this site because I kept writing long internal documents about technical decisions — why we chose SQLite for a specific service, how I approach reading unfamiliar code, what my dotfile setup actually looks like after years of iteration — and it seemed wasteful to keep them in a private Notion. So I put them here instead, cleaned up, with some of the context removed.
What I write about
Mostly backend development and the tooling around it. I'm not trying to be comprehensive or authoritative. These are notes from my own experience, which means they're specific and occasionally wrong.
Recurring topics: Go (the language, the ecosystem, the things that still surprise me after three years), SQLite (I'm a convert and occasionally an evangelist), self-hosting (I run more services than I should), and dotfiles/workflow (an area where I've learned mostly by doing it badly first).
Things I use
Neovim Go 1.22+ SQLite Nix (slowly) Tailscale fish shell chezmoi
Contact
hello [at] velantis.cfd. I read everything; I'm slow at replying.