Articles
Field notes from production infrastructure: what failed, what the telemetry showed, and what changed afterward.
Modernizing What You Cannot Redeploy
Weighted systems need modernization too, just translated for infrastructure that will never be disposable. Five practices that survive the crossing, what each one turns into on the other side, and the failure mode each one carries.
Observability Meets the Filesystem
The 2026 observability doctrine wants everything streamed continuously. At the filesystem the physics push back, and scheduled batch collection turns out to be the correct engineering response rather than the un-modernized one.
Why Change Management Is Deliberately Slow
Deployment frequency is the celebrated metric of the age, so an hour spent on one paragraph of a change plan looks like pathology. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is the most rational activity in the building, and what separates the two cases is weight rather than maturity.
Old Protocols Persist Because They Are Correct
The old monitoring and messaging protocols are load-bearing members of the modern stack rather than fossils it tolerates. The reason says something general about why stable interfaces ossify, and why that ossification is usually a feature.
The Ideal and the Actual
The 2026 infrastructure ideal is declarative, ephemeral, and self-healing, and for a large class of companies it is simply correct. For the weighted world that holds most of the data that matters, a different set of rules applies, and the skill that counts is telling which world a given system lives in.
Script, Configure, or Orchestrate
Imperative, declarative, orchestrated: how to recognize which one a problem actually needs, the tells that you have stretched a script past its boundary, and an honest line between knowing where the boundary sits and running the tools on the far side of it.
Bulk Deletion Is Not a Threading Problem
Why -exec rm {} \; is the real cost, what -delete and -exec + fix that threads do not, the one thing that decides whether parallelism helps or hurts, and a safe parameterized cleanup that does the right thing by default.
Anatomy of a Failover
A layer-by-layer walk through a NAS node failover: what the network does, what TCP does, how NFSv3, NFSv4, and SMB3 each recover state, and why the timers stack the way they do.
Idempotency Before the Word
A jargon-free introduction to idempotency, why run-it-twice safety is the foundation of trustworthy automation, how to build it in bash, and why the entire infrastructure-as-code world is organized around this one idea.
Design for the Failure First
Why the senior move is to design the failure behavior first: the questions to ask before an unattended job ships, why partial failure is the one that gets you, and the judgment about which systems earn the discipline and which do not.
Break/Fix Taught Me Safer Automation
The guardrails support work drills into you before you write a line of automation: dry runs by default, bounded blast radius, timeouts on everything, and logging decisions instead of just actions.