About Me

Hello! Welcome to “Echoes from the Shell”, my personal blog about building great software products and the infrastructure plumbing it takes to get there. I’m Hanno, a product engineer at heart who somehow keeps ending up deep in cloud architecture and DevSecOps.

What I Do Link to heading

I love building products that feel right the moment you use them. But over a decade in tech has taught me that great products need great foundations, so I kept going deeper into infrastructure, pipelines, and platform work to get the software where I wanted it to be.

I currently work as a cloud consultant for businesses and public organizations, helping teams adopt container and cloud technologies and shift toward DevSecOps. My lens is always product-first: how do we make the secure path the easy path, and how do we remove friction so engineers can ship faster?

Before that, I was VP of Product Development at EdgeIQ in Boston, building an IoT platform for the connected product economy. I started there as a Software Engineer, grew into Senior Architect, and eventually ran product development. The pattern kept repeating: I’d set out to build a great product and end up building the infrastructure to make it possible.

Before EdgeIQ, I was a Product Manager at Silexica, working on a cloud-based web IDE for C/C++ development (before vscode.dev was a thing) and managing a team building tooling for low-level systems developers. Even there, a product role on paper, I couldn’t stop myself from getting into the technical details.

I’ve also written a course on building scalable applications on AWS for educative.io.

Cloud Architecture & DevSecOps (The “By Necessity” Part) Link to heading

All that infrastructure work wasn’t accidental. It’s what stands between a good idea and a product that is robust and people can actually rely on. I focus on cloud architecture and pragmatic DevSecOps with an emphasis on developer experience. The goal: bake security and compliance into the developer workflow rather than bolt it on later. This includes designing container-native CI/CD pipelines that automatically generate build artifacts, documentation, and compliance deliverables such as SBOMs and vulnerability scan reports.

In practice, that means least-privilege IAM, OAuth 2.0 / OIDC for authentication and authorization, secure secret stores with rotation, and GitOps for both infrastructure and applications. Pipelines are standardized: builds, tests, security checks, and releases follow the same structure. Pull requests spin up ephemeral preview environments, policy gates enforce quality before promotion, and every release carries traceable provenance so we know exactly what shipped and why.

Compliance is automated, not a fire drill. SBOMs (SPDX or CycloneDX) are generated for every build, artifacts are signed and attested, and vulnerability and license scans run continuously with results surfaced in code reviews and stored alongside artifacts. The outcome: repeatable, auditable releases that keep velocity high without compromising trust.

Day to day tooling: Kubernetes, Helm Charts, Terraform, AWS CDK; GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins; Docker Buildx/BuildKit for multi-arch images; Argo CD or Flux for GitOps (if needed). For security: Trivy and Syft for SBOMs, Cosign/Sigstore for signing, Dependabot or Renovate for dependency updates. Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and OpenTelemetry for open-source stacks, or Datadog when depth and speed matter more. Documentation is generated from source where possible, with changelogs and reports wired directly into reviews. I prefer monorepos (especially now that AI tools benefit from full context), but I’m comfortable automating across multiple repositories too.

Languages and platforms: TypeScript, Go, C, and C++, with some Qt5/QML for desktop work. IaC across AWS, Azure, and GCP. At home on Linux and Mac, functional on Windows. I also enjoy working across the full range from low-level embedded devices (e.g. Arduino, ESP32, Raspberry Pi) to cloud services (e.g. AWS IoT, Azure IoT), with experience in MQTT, TLS, OPC UA, and Modbus.

This Blog Link to heading

“Echoes from the Shell” is where I write about the full stack of building products, from user-facing experiences down to the infrastructure that makes them possible. If you’ve ever set out to build something delightful and found yourself three layers deep in Kubernetes manifests, you’ll feel at home here.

You can reach me at hanno@hko.sh.

Thanks for stopping by.