Writing
Writing
Notes on platform engineering, reliability, and security.
Six years from 'works on my machine' to pipelines for everyone
CI/CD maturity is a multi-year culture change, not a tool install. The win is making the right way the easy way.
I changed employers four times without changing jobs
For a lot of engineers, changing companies happens to you. The skill is staying effective through reorg and acquisition noise.
Public APIs are almost forever
You can always add to an API. You can almost never remove from one. Design the one-way door like it's a one-way door.
Sometimes you pay for idle, on purpose
Autoscaling optimizes the steady state. For the once-a-year cliff, the right move is to pay for idle capacity on purpose.
Cutting the cord: migrating off a parent company before the clock runs out
Divestiture migrations are the hardest kind: a hard deadline, deep hidden coupling, and zero tolerance for downtime. The work is mostly discovery.
A maturity model people didn't roll their eyes at
Most maturity models die as a checklist handed down from on high. Tie it to DORA and risk, run a real review, and it earns its keep.
Standing up Vault is the easy part
Standing up a secrets manager takes an afternoon. Operating workload identity across thousands of servers, for years, is the actual job.