About

About Me

You can call me Dera aka Dre, This is my little spot on the web where I talk about myself and stuff that I like, and I hope you can find something cool or useful here.

I’m an engineer at Eaglelion Systems, where I focus on building and maintaining systems that power digital banking at scale. My current work revolves around the CBE SuperApp, where I’ve been deeply involved in Telemetry and Monitoring making sure the systems we ship are not only performant, but transparent, reliable, and auditable. A lot of my time goes into finding better ways to weave observability into workflows, sharing lessons with my team, and pushing toward systems that tell their own stories through metrics and traces.

I joined Eaglelion after two years at YeneHealth, where I worked on telehealth services designed to make healthcare more accessible and dependable. It was a formative experience: I left with a deep appreciation for the discipline of running a well maintained service that balances technical rigor with meaningful human impact.

Earlier, I worked with NOAH Real Estate PLC and Ahun App, building systems that ranged from supply chain management to distributed e-commerce and social platforms. Each of those roles taught me something different about how to balance technical precision with real world usability whether the challenge was scaling backend systems, optimizing user flows, or building resilient integrations.

Having moved across industries and roles, I’ve developed a strong interest in building systems that are not just functional, but maintainable and future proof. Whether that means using AWS, MongoDB, or Elastic, or improving CI/CD pipelines to reduce developer friction, my goal is always the same: to build solutions that stand the test of time. These days, I’m especially drawn to data driven approaches and observability, using metrics and telemetry to make better business decisions, scale applications, and deeply understand how systems behave.

I live in Addis Ababa. My favorite movie is Wim Wender’s Perfect Days. My favorite book is Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein (although I like a lot of others). Outside of work, I spend time on personal projects, reading about emerging technology, and connecting my technical interests with broader creative pursuits. I also enjoy running, photography, history, meditation, urban design, and metal.

In 2020, I helped create Codenight, a community built to foster collaboration in Ethiopia’s creative and tech scenes. It started with a simple idea, give developers and designers a place to connect and has since grown to more than 10,000 members, continuing to be a space where people share, learn, and build together.

I publish to my blog, with tweet sized atoms, short form fragments, and longer articles less frequently. If you like the content here, you should check out a sample edition and consider subscribing.

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Technology

Over the years I’ve worked with a wide range of technologies to build and maintain reliable systems:

• Languages: Proficient in Go and JavaScript, using both for backend services and frontend applications.
• Frameworks & Libraries: Experienced with React, NestJS, Express, and Next.js for everything from interfaces to APIs.
• Databases: Skilled with Oracle, MongoDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, managing everything from operational stores to analytics.
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Hands on with AWS (S3, EC2, CloudFormation), containerization with Docker, orchestration with Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions.
• Observability: Deeply interested in telemetry stacks — OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana — to measure, understand, and continuously improve systems.