About

I’m Cauê Braz. I started programming at fourteen because of a game. I played Tibia, and at some point playing wasn’t enough. I wanted my own server, with my own rules, and the open server projects of the time were written in C and C++. So I learned C and C++ the way a kid learns anything he actually wants: badly, at night, from forum posts and other people’s code, breaking things until they ran. The first time a friend logged into a world I had compiled myself, I understood what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I just didn’t have the word for it yet.

That was more than twenty years ago. For the last fifteen I’ve been paid to write software, and for the last ten I’ve worked on the part of it that decides whether everything else holds. How production is architected and how it fails. How code gets from a pull request to running in front of users. Who can reach what, and how we’d know. What the platform costs and what that buys. Today I do that as a Staff DevOps and Platform Engineer, from Brazil, for teams that build products and AI systems. The kid who wanted his own server grew into someone who runs the servers so that other people can build their worlds on top.

Before infrastructure became the main part of my work, I spent years building software. That changes how I look at a platform. I know what it is to depend on one to get a change into production, and what it is to keep it running afterward.

The thing that pulled me into infrastructure is the same thing that kept me up at fourteen. I want to know what’s happening underneath. And over the years I noticed something about what happens underneath: systems talk. The incident that comes back every quarter. The manual step everyone knows about and nobody removes. The credential that lives in a shared doc because the day it was created was a busy one. I don’t read these as failures. I read them as messages from a system that couldn’t find another way to be heard, so it repeats itself. When I see one, I slow down, I sit with not knowing a little longer than feels comfortable, and I ask what the repetition is protecting before I try to remove it. Most of what I know about running systems I learned by listening that way.

What I need from the systems I run Link to heading

I’m at ease when I can answer “how is this configured” by opening a repository. I get uneasy when the answer lives in someone’s head, and that unease has turned out to be useful. It points to the next thing that should be written down. So the infrastructure I build is code, it gets reviewed like code, and the number behind a decision comes with its source and its date. When it doesn’t, I say it’s an assumption in the same breath.

I need protection settled before growth. Backups that have actually been restored. Access that can be audited. Some slack for the day the provider bill doubles. After that I feel free to make things faster or cheaper.

I need a system to be small enough that one person can hold it in their head. When I can’t audit it end to end, I catch myself trusting it instead of knowing it. Trust without knowledge is where the next incident is already waiting.

What I do Link to heading

The word “staff” in my title is about position, not rank. My work crosses teams. I step in when a decision no longer fits within a single context, and I stay until it is clear enough to be challenged and put into practice without depending on me. Over time I’ve come to see that behind these decisions is a short list of questions that a system keeps asking in different words. My job is to hear which one is being asked.

Is it reliable. When it fails, does it fail in a way we understand, at a scale we can afford, and does it come back without someone heroically awake at 3am? I want failure to be designed behavior, not a surprise. A system with no declared failure mode still has one. It just hasn’t told us yet.

Can we see it. Does the system produce evidence of its own behavior, in logs, metrics and traces that one person can read as a single story? I feel lost inside a system that can’t describe itself, and lost is where I make my worst decisions. Observability is how I stop guessing.

Is it safe. Who can reach what, how do we know, and would we notice if that changed? I want access to be the least a person needs, for the time they need it, written down where a third person can check. Every credential that lives in someone’s memory is a promise the organization made without realizing.

What does it cost, and what does that buy. I read a bill as a description of behavior. Cost is where intention meets reality, and a line that grows without anyone deciding it should is a decision the system made on its own. Every unit of spend should have an owner and a reason, or it should go.

Will it hold. Performance and scale are the same question at two distances. Does the system do the work in the time a person is willing to wait, and does it keep doing so when ten times as many people show up? I’d rather find the limit before the traffic does, and turn the limit into a number we chose.

Can we change it. How long between an idea and that idea running in production, and how much fear is on that path? I measure delivery by how little courage it takes. A team that’s afraid to deploy has been told something about its system. The fear is the message.

And then the newest version of all of the above, asked about AI. Which model is being called, by whom, at what cost, with what data, and who would know if any of those answers changed tonight. Platform work for AI is the old discipline with a faster bill, and I want the governance in place before the invoice teaches it to us.

I write RFCs because these questions get answered in writing or they don’t get answered. A document that a team can read, push back on and adopt is the real unit of my work. The infrastructure that follows is a consequence of it.

How I like to work with people Link to heading

When I disagree with something, I’ll tell you what I saw, where, and what it caused. I won’t tell you what you are. “The job at line 42 fails with a timeout because the idle limit is 30 seconds” is something we can work on together. “This is broken” isn’t. I try to say the need behind my position out loud, and I try to make requests you’re free to turn down.

Part of my work is leaving enough context for someone else to make the next decision without having to call me.

I lead with the bad news, and with the number behind it. When I soften it, the other person hears the softening and misses the news, and we both lose a day.

I’m wrong on a regular basis. When you see it, tell me what you saw and what it produced. I won’t defend a position after the evidence has walked away from it.

What you’ll find here Link to heading

This is where I share what I learn while doing the work above. Things that went wrong and what they taught me, decisions I’d make again and ones I wouldn’t, and the occasional note on a tool that earned its place. I’m writing it down so that someone facing the same problem later finds a starting point instead of a blank page.

If any of it helps you, or if you see something I missed, I’d be glad to hear from you.